How it works

1. 1

   Create a trip

   A trip is whatever you are sharing the cost of — a weekend away, a holiday, a shared house, or a single night out. Name it and add the people who are in it. They can be names you typed: nobody else needs an account for the split to be right. Anyone who wants their own view can follow an invite link and get one free.

2. 2

   Add receipts and expenses

   Photograph receipts as they happen, and type in the things that never had one — a taxi paid in cash, the parking, somebody covering the tickets. Add as many as the trip lasts. Everything lands in the same place and the totals update as it arrives, so nobody is keeping a private tally in their head.

3. 3

   Settle up, and complete the trip

   PayUp works out who owes whom across everything in the trip at once, and reduces it to the fewest payments that clear everyone. It recalculates as receipts arrive, so there is no final reckoning to sit down and do. When everyone has paid, mark the trip completed and it moves out of your active list.

Many receipts, one payment

This is the whole point of a trip. Settling each bill as it happens means a payment per bill — and most of those payments exist only because money is passing through somebody on its way somewhere else.

Say four of you go away for a weekend. Ana buys dinner on Friday, Ben covers the taxis, Cara pays for Saturday lunch, and Dan gets the coffees. Settled one bill at a time, by Sunday it looks like this:

• Ben owes Ana $40
• Cara owes Ben $40
• Dan owes Cara $40

Ben receives $40 and hands on $40. So does Cara. Because all four receipts are in one trip, PayUp can see that — and settles the trip rather than the bills:

• Dan pays Ana $40

One payment instead of three, and nobody fronts money they are only going to pass along. On a real weekend with a dozen receipts the difference is far larger and much harder to work out by hand — which is why groups usually give up and leave it uneven.

• It reads the line items

  Descriptions, quantities and prices, so nobody is typing them off a curled-up bit of paper. A line reading 3 × Taco arrives as three separate items, each priced to the cent, so every one of them can go to a different person.

• It asks whether it read them correctly

  Receipts are printed badly, folded, and photographed in the dark. PayUp shows you what it read and lets you correct it there and then — far cheaper than discovering it in the total after everyone has paid.

• You tap who had what

  Assign each line to whoever ordered it. A shared plate can be divided between several people, and anything genuinely communal — a bottle of wine, the chips in the middle — spread across everyone at once.

• Tax and tip follow the food

  The part worth understanding. Both are apportioned against what each person actually ordered, to the cent, rather than divided evenly. Somebody who had a salad while the rest had steak stops subsidising the difference — which is precisely what an even split does, quietly, every time.

The things that never had a receipt

Plenty of what a group spends leaves no paper at all. Those go in as fixed amounts: type the name, say who paid, and choose whether it is split evenly between the people it covers or divided into shares you set yourself.

They sit in the trip alongside the receipts and settle up with them. Fixed amounts do not count against your monthly receipt allowance — there is no photograph to read, so there is nothing to meter.

What happens to the photographs

The receipt image is used to read the items, and then it stops being useful. PayUp deletes it automatically after 30 days, or 90 days on the paid plan. The split itself stays correct forever — it is the photograph that goes, not the arithmetic.

The full detail, including what is stored and how to have it removed, is in the privacy policy.