offline

Adding expenses where there is no signal

Basement restaurants, ski lifts, festival fields, a SIM that gave up at the border. The moment you actually need to write the number down is usually the moment you cannot.

Start a split

Takes ten seconds. No email, no password, no download.

The places where a group spends money together are, with impressive consistency, the places with the worst connectivity anyone encounters. A cellar bar with two bars of nothing. The lift queue. Somewhere over the Atlantic. A festival where forty thousand phones are all fighting over one mast.

And the failure mode is worse than annoying. You type in the €47 taxi, the save fails, the drawer says it could not reach the server, and now the only copy of that number is you remembering it. Nobody remembers it.

What a queued expense actually does

The expense is written to your own phone, appears in the room's list with a "queued" mark on it, and sends itself the moment there is a connection again. You can close the tab. You can close the installed app. You can put the phone in a pocket for four hours and get on a plane.

What happens in order

  1. You type it, with no signal

    The expense is saved on the device and the row appears immediately, marked as waiting. Nothing is lost and nothing has to be remembered.

  2. The connection comes back

    The queue drains by itself, one expense at a time, in the order you typed them — never in parallel, so the room's history reads the way the evening actually went.

  3. Everyone else sees them arrive

    The other people in the room get the expenses as they land, in that order. Nobody has to be told to refresh.

What deliberately does not queue

Only new expenses wait. Editing an expense, deleting one, and recording a payment all still need a live connection, and the line between the two groups is money rather than effort.

Why the line is drawn there

  • A new expense is still true when it lands late"Ana paid €47 for the taxi" does not stop being a fact because the room moved on while you were underground. Worst case it arrives out of the moment.
  • An edit replayed over someone else's edit is a silent overwriteTwo people fixing the same row while one of them is offline ends with one change quietly gone and no conflict shown anywhere.
  • A payment replayed is a double paymentYou queue "I paid Bea €40" in a tunnel. Bea gets the cash at the table and somebody records it there. Both land. The room now believes €80 moved. Money says no.

That last one is the whole reason the feature is shaped this way. A splitter that queues everything looks more capable in a feature list and is worse at the only job that matters.

Being usable offline is not the same as working offline

Two honest limits, because the difference gets oversold everywhere else.

You need a connection to open a room the first time on a device — the room lives on a server, not in the link. Once it is open, it is installable as an app, and the numbers you already loaded stay on screen. And a queued expense is on one device: it is not in the room, and nobody else can see it, until it sends.

So the offline story is "keep typing, nothing is lost", not "the group ledger works in a Faraday cage". The first one is the one that actually happens on a trip.

Start the room before you lose signal

Open it once with a connection, share the link, and everyone can keep adding from wherever they end up.

Start a split

Questions

Can I add an expense with no internet?
Yes. The expense is saved on your phone with a "queued" mark on the row and sends itself the moment you are back online. You do not have to remember it, retype it, or keep the tab open.
What happens to a queued expense if I close the app?
It waits. The queue lives on your device and survives a reload, a tab close and a restart of the installed app. It sends in the order you typed things in, never in parallel.
Can I settle up offline?
No, and that is deliberate. A payment queued on a phone in a tunnel, while the same payment gets recorded at the table by someone with signal, is a double payment written down as fact.
Is there a limit to how much I can queue?
Thirty expenses per device, which is a whole evening of receipts. Past that the oldest is dropped and you are told, because a queue with no ceiling is a storage error later that fails silently.