When every booking lands on your card

"I'll get the flights, sort it out later," someone says in March. Nobody sorts it out later. The Airbnb deposit goes on the same card that week, then the car hire, then the ferry, and by the time anybody is packing you are four months into fronting a holiday for four people. So much for later!

Whether that money comes back matters more than the amount involved. When it does not, the person who fronted it usually says nothing about it, and stops being the one who organises anything, and the trips end without anybody deciding to end them.

Let Split by Peanut keep the ledger from the first booking instead. The room opens in about ten seconds, there is no account to make and nothing to download, and what anybody adds is on everybody's screen as they add it. By August the total is old news, and the last message in the group chat is a payment plan rather than a request.

The room goes in before the deposit does

Every booking landing on one card is a decision nobody actually made. It happened because you were the one with the tab open in March, and by June it means one person is carrying a holiday and the other three are carrying nothing.

The drip that nobody logs

The big bookings are the easy part. You remember a deposit. What quietly empties the account is a week of "I'll get this one".

The morning coffees. The groceries on the first night because you reached the till first. The suncream nobody packed. The round you bought because somebody had to. Each one is small enough that stopping to write it down feels petty, and by Thursday the person who keeps saying it is a couple of hundred down without noticing.

You offered to book the Airbnb. Nobody asked you to run an unsecured lending desk for four people out of a current account.

So put them in at the table, while the receipt is still on it. It takes longer to describe than to do, and no signal is not a problem: an expense typed with no connection waits on the phone and goes when the connection comes back.

Enter what you actually paid, in the currency you paid it in. Split converts 158 currencies, and an expense in one of them is converted at the day's rate and fixed onto the expense when you add it, so the history does not move under you later. The rate is indicative, not your bank's.

At the end there is a pile of small debts

Four months of bookings and a week of small rounds comes out as debts pointing in every direction, and paying those off one at a time is how a finished trip stays open for another month. The room nets them against each other instead and hands you a short payment plan: two or three transfers instead of twenty, each one a single person paying a single person.

There is a card at the end of it too — what the trip cost and who fronted the most money. If the deposit went on your card in March, that last line is the only acknowledgement the trip is going to produce.

Good to know

Four facts about the room, worth having in March rather than in August.

• It is free forever, with nothing to upgrade to. Peanut makes it to introduce people to Peanut, which is how Split gets paid for, so there is no paid tier waiting to be sold to you halfway through a trip.
• It does not move the money. A settled row means somebody tapped to say they paid, not that a payment cleared. Split does not check with a bank and cannot, which is fine among friends and worth knowing about your own ledger.
• It will not chase anyone. No reminder emails, no nudges into the group chat. If somebody goes quiet, that part is still yours.
• It holds up to twenty people. A group, not a conference.