Remember the expense. Keep the friendship easy.
A small interaction can remove a surprising amount of uncertainty. Explore an equal split; the full project also considers group context, reminders, and the conversation around an expense.
An equal-split example. No payment is processed.
Shared spending rarely becomes confusing because the arithmetic is difficult. During my bachelor’s, friends paid for meals, travel, and things for the group, then tried to reconstruct the details later. An amount might be remembered while the people, purpose, or intended split had already become unclear.
Expense Hive grew out of those everyday conversations. My friends and I used the app ourselves, so awkward logging and confusing splits became visible quickly. Personal spending also needed its own place: mixing it with group costs made even a correct total difficult to understand.
I brought expense logging, bills, group splitting, reminders, chat, and spending summaries into one mobile experience. The aim was to capture the situation while it was still fresh, then preserve the connection between an amount, the people involved, and the conversation around settling it.
Add the expense close to the moment of payment, identify who paid, and place it in personal spending or the relevant group. Attaching the bill keeps a concrete reference beside the amount, reducing the need to remember the details later.
Assign the people involved and use the appropriate split. The useful result is a clear view of who owes whom, with group chat available for questions about the expense. The record and its explanation belong together.
Use reminders to follow up and weekly or monthly summaries to understand spending over time. A later review should reconnect someone with the original expense instead of starting another search through messages and receipts.
Personal totals and group obligations answer different questions. Keeping that distinction visible was essential to making summaries useful and preventing a group purchase from becoming ambiguous personal spending.
A financial record alone cannot explain every shared decision. Bringing group conversation into the app recognised that settling a bill involves agreement and context as well as a calculated amount.
The longer entry takes, the easier it is to postpone. Reducing the effort of adding an expense helped preserve details before memory weakened, making interaction design part of the quality of the record.
Expense Hive is a bachelor project built around a real need and used within my own circle. Its story concerns recording, splitting, and discussing expenses. It does not establish payment-processing capabilities, a current public release, or adoption beyond that personal context.
How should a corrected bill change an existing split without confusing the group? Could settlement history explain changes as clearly as the current balance? Those questions would guide further exploration of shared accountability and the moments when a simple expense becomes an exception.
Making the subtleties of movement visible.