How to use Hisaab

1. Open the app and tap Sign in with Google. Your Google email is your identity here — balances, member lists and splits all key on it.
2. If your email hasn't been invited yet you'll see a gate. Ask whoever owns the Hisaab to add you, then tap I've been added — check again.
3. If you belong to exactly one hisaab, the app skips the home screen and drops you straight into it. The back arrow still takes you home.

Type what happened, glance at the preview line that appears above the box, and press Enter (or tap Add). The preview always shows exactly what will be saved, so nothing is a surprise.

Use the Category dropdown in the preview to pick a category before adding. Automatic follows the description; a category you choose stays selected while you edit. The next entry starts on Automatic again.

Choose from categories including Travel & transport, Car care & insurance, Subscriptions & memberships, Activities & attractions, Stationery & printing, Home & household, Clothing & accessories, Personal care & wellness, and Bank & card fees. Dining, food delivery and desserts stay together under Food & dining. Improved automatic matching also applies to older entries; saved category overrides stay as they are.

Travel & transport combines flights, trains and car rentals, including older entries in those categories. Everyday rides, fuel and car care stay separate.

Automatic categories work best when you name the purchase: “Costco fuel”, “Amazon phone case” or “pet food”. A store name alone can cover many kinds of purchases. If the category is wrong or says Other, choose it from the dropdown before adding.

Tap an existing purchase, then Record refund. Enter the amount received as a positive number, check Refund received by and save. The original split proportions fill automatically; you can change them or record a partial refund. Everyone's selected share comes back to them, even if you already settled the purchase. The original purchase stays in history.

For a standalone refund, tap + → Full form and choose Refund received as the transaction type. Choose your own split; there is no automatic matching to bank purchases.

The full form also has an optional Note for what was bought or returned. Notes appear when you expand the entry and in exports. Refunds reduce spending on the date you record the refund.

• 🎤 — optional voice entry. Blocked by default in local-only mode because your browser may send audio to its speech service. When enabled in AI privacy, each start needs confirmation.
• ＋ — the other ways in: Full form, ⚡ Paste many, 📷 Receipt, Settle up.

• Description — chips underneath show what you buy most often in this hisaab. Tap one and it jumps straight to the amount.
• Date — Today Yesterday or 📅 Other for the date picker.
• Category — guessed from what you typed, and it keeps up as you keep typing. Tap Change to pick a different one; once you do, it stops second-guessing you.
• Paid by — one tap per person.
• Split — Equally, Unequally (exact amounts), By %, or By shares. Untick anyone who isn't in on it. With two people, enter either person's amount or percentage and the other fills automatically. With more people, enter each person's value. Switching between the tabs keeps whatever you've already typed, and moving from Equally pre-fills the even amounts, including leftover cents. Percentages accept two decimal places and must total 100%; remaining cents go to the largest fractional shares, with ties following the participant order. Saved splits keep their original amounts.

If nothing's been logged for a couple of weeks, a banner appears at the top of the hisaab: "Last entry was 25 days ago — catch up on what you've both spent since?" Tap Catch up (or ＋ → ⚡ Paste many).

1. Copy transactions out of your bank or card app and paste them in. One per line is ideal, but a whole statement pasted as one blob works too — it gets split at the dates, and reference numbers are ignored.
2. The header tells you when you last entered anything, so you know where to resume.
3. Tap Review & add. The whole batch appears on one screen.

On the review screen

• “Whose card is this?” — tap a name once and every row is set to that person. This is the point of the screen: entering your partner's statement doesn't mean fixing the payer twenty times.
• Every row is editable — description, amount, date, and payer individually if one row differs.
• Anything already in this hisaab is flagged and unticked automatically, so re-pasting an overlapping statement won't double-count.
• Lines it couldn't read are listed, not silently dropped — open the collapsed note to see them.
• Untick anything you don't want, then tap Add N expenses. It's one action with a single Undo.

1. Take or pick a photo. A single shop receipt becomes one expense (the merchant and the final total). A screenshot of a statement becomes one row per transaction.
2. From the home screen, tap your name → AI privacy. Change Local-only to Ask for confirmation each time and add your own Gemini API key. The key is stored in this browser and is sent only to Google for approved requests.
3. Confirm each photo upload after reading what will leave Hisaab. Anything visible in the photo can be sent, including personal details. Cancel sends no photo and keeps the selection.
4. Results land on the same review screen as a paste, so all the same controls apply.

Give it a description, an amount, a day of the month, and who pays. From then on that month's expense is added automatically the first time anyone opens the hisaab on or after that day, split evenly. Short months use their last day.

• Two people opening the app at once can't create it twice.
• Pause stops it adding new months but keeps the template, so you can start it again later — useful for something you skip over the summer. Resuming picks up from the current month; the months it was paused for stay skipped.
• × deletes the template outright. Either way the months it already added stay put — only future ones change. There's an Undo if you didn't mean it.
• Category is worth setting when the description doesn't say it plainly — a rent template called “ACH 4471 XFER” lands under Other otherwise, and drags your summary with it.

The top half shows where everyone stands. Underneath, Suggested settlements is the shortest set of payments that clears everything.

• Pay appears on a row where you're the one who owes. If they've saved more than one way to be paid, you pick: Venmo and UPI open the app with the person and amount already filled in. Zelle can't be opened by any link — Zelle lives inside your own bank's app — so Hisaab shows their Zelle id, the amount and a note with a Copy button each, and a button to record the payment when you're back.
• Remind appears on a row where you are the one owed. It sends that person a notification saying what's outstanding. You can only do it once every few hours per person — deliberately.
• Settle records that a payment happened. These are two separate steps on purpose — paying and recording are different things, and Hisaab never moves money itself.
• For a friend you share several hisaabs with, open them from the Friends tab and use Settle up everywhere — it records one payment per shared ledger so every balance lands on zero.

• Pick a period along the top — this month, last month, 3 or 6 months, this year, all time, or 📅 Pick dates for an exact from–to. Everything below follows it.
• Complete history is checked online before totals appear, including older expenses outside the live list. Loading, invalid records, incomplete coverage and read errors show a status instead of a partial total or an empty month. Updates made through Hisaab are checked together; direct database changes may need another refresh. Use Refresh to check again; after going offline, reconnect and retry.
• The numbers card separates gross purchases, refunds received and net spending (purchases less refunds), plus your net share, spending-entry count, net per entry/day, each person's net paid amount and the five biggest purchases. Refunds reduce spending on their own dates; they never change original purchases. The largest refund is labelled separately. Settle-up payments are listed separately and never counted as spending.
• Zero and refunds: category and member bars extend right of zero for positive net amounts and left for negative amounts. Zero has no fill. Net-share percentages are omitted when refunds are present or net spending is zero or negative. Comparisons show the amount change; percentage changes appear only when both periods have positive net spending. Excel follows the same percentage rule, leaving those cells blank.
• Ask about this period — type a question in your own words (“what did we spend most on?”, “who paid more?”) and get a plain answer. Tap one of the suggestions if you'd rather not type. It works without an API key too, just in a fixed format.
• The ring shows gross purchases by category before refunds, with the gross purchase total in the middle. A refund-only period has an empty ring and zero purchases; its refunds and negative net remain visible in the numbers and category list.
• The little bars under the ring show net spending for the last twelve recorded months. Positive net extends above zero; refunds exceeding purchases extend below zero. Zero has no bar. Tap a month to jump to its dates and exact amounts.
• Searching: the Expenses tab has a search box — type part of a description, a category, someone's name, or an amount. Words are combined, so “dinner olive” finds only rows matching both.
• Tap any category in the list to see exactly which expenses made it up. Tap it again to close. Re-filing an expense now appears as an edit in Activity.
• ⬇ Excel — at the bottom. A real .xlsx workbook covering every expense in the hisaab, not just what's on screen, on four sheets: Expenses (a column per person), Balances, By category, and Members. It needs a connection, because it reads the full history.
• ⬇ CSV (this period) — next to it. The verified selected dates and, when selected, category. Includes refunds and nondeleted payments; selecting a spending category excludes payments. Payment rows are labelled separately and do not count as spending. The filename includes the dates. A connection is required.
• Activity tab (home screen) — everything added, edited, deleted or settled across all your hisaabs, newest first. Anything since your last visit is highlighted. Tap an expense activity to open the right hisaab and expand that exact transaction: it comes into view with a brief outline. Older entries appear under Transaction from activity; deleted ones still show their history. If loading is slow or the transaction is unavailable, a message explains what happened. Go back to Activity to try again. Back works as usual.

• Just added something wrong? Every save shows a toast with Undo for a few seconds. A whole pasted batch undoes in one tap too.
• Splitting by shares. In the expense form, By shares lets you say “twice as much for me” without doing the maths: type 2, 1, 1 and it shows you $50.00 / $25.00 / $25.00 as you type. Useful when one person had the big room, or two of you shared a dish.
• Notes on an expense. Expand any expense and add a note — “this included the party stuff”. Everyone else in the hisaab gets a notification, and the note stays attached to that expense forever.
• Tap any expense to expand it — you'll see who paid, each person's share, its category, and the full edit history with what changed.
• Filed under the wrong thing? Expand it and tap the category to pick a better one. Worth doing — the Summary tab is only as honest as these, and a bank description like “SQ *ABC 4471” will sit under Other until you say otherwise. Your choice sticks even if you edit the description later.
• Edit overwrites the values but keeps a record of the previous ones, shown as a proper before/after.
• Delete is a soft delete: the row stays, struck through, with a Restore button. It stops counting towards balances immediately.
• Looking for something you deleted? Tap the 🗑 Recently deleted chip at the top of the hisaab — every deleted expense is listed there, newest first, each with Restore.
• Deleted a whole group? It's under Recently deleted at the bottom of the Groups tab, with everything intact — and any active, invited member can restore it, not just the admin.

Install

Open the site in Chrome or Safari and use Add to Home Screen / Install app. It then opens like any other app, full screen.

Offline

Changes to existing expenses (including categories, delete, restore and batch Undo) need a connection to check the latest version. If an edit fails or someone else changed the expense, your edit form stays open. Copy your changes before reopening the latest expense. If a delete or restore reports that a newer action superseded it, review the current entry before trying again. New entries can still be queued offline; notifications wait for server confirmation and may be missed if you close the page before it arrives.

After the complete app shell has been cached, you can reopen it offline. The orange status bar distinguishes offline, unavailable device storage and saves awaiting server confirmation. Offline entry is blocked while storage is checking or unavailable. Pending forms keep their values until confirmation; do not add the same expense again. Keep the tab open and reconnect.

After an uncertain save or reload, use Check saves in the status bar. It checks the original entries and avoids repeating balance changes. This tab keeps a local retry journal with the submitted values and entry IDs until confirmation; closing the tab or clearing site data can lose it. Unsubmitted drafts are not restored after reload. Look in the ledger before re-entering anything. Signing out waits for pending saves; this device storage is not a backup.

When an update is ready, finish your drafts and pending saves, then reload. New updates no longer force a reload over your work. The next normal launch uses the updated app shell. Your first transition from an older app version may still use its earlier automatic-reload behavior.

Notifications

On the home screen, tap your name → Turn on notifications to be told when someone else adds, edits or deletes something — it names the person, what they touched and which hisaab, and tapping it opens that entry. When enabled, the same menu shows Notifications on; tap it to turn notifications off. You are never notified about your own changes. Delivery is best-effort.

On an iPhone you must add Hisaab to your home screen first — Apple only allows notifications for installed web apps. On Android and desktop it works straight away.

Share into it

Once installed, Hisaab shows up in your phone's share sheet. Share a bank SMS or a payment confirmation from any app and it lands in the typing bar ready to check — or, if it's long, in the paste screen.

• Groups are for several people — a house, a trip. Friends are private one-to-one ledgers.
• Creating groups and friends, and adding members, is admin only. Adding a friend needs an internet connection. Everyone else can add and settle expenses in the open hisaabs they're active in, which keeps access from spreading on its own.
• You can add someone by email before they've ever signed in — the hisaab simply appears for them the first time they log in with that Google account.
• Archiving. A trip that's over, or a flat you no longer share? ⚙ → Archive moves it into its own Archived list at the bottom of the Groups tab. Everyone must be settled first. History stays readable, but expenses, settings and membership cannot change until an active member chooses Unarchive.
• ⚙ Settings opens for everyone. It lists who's in the group and where each person stands, and it's where you'll find Backup this group and Leave group. Group name, icon and currency are admin-only.
• Leaving a group yourself. Once you're settled up — nothing owed either way — open ⚙ Settings and tap Leave group. Everyone else carries on in the same hisaab; you stop being included in new expenses. If you still owe or are owed something, it says so and sends you to Balances to settle first. Good for a trip that's done, or a flat you've moved out of.
• You keep everything. A group you've left stays in your list under Groups you've left, fully readable — every expense, every split, your name still on all of it. You just can't add to it. Rejoin is available while the group is open. If it is archived or deleted, an active member must unarchive or restore it first. History access still requires an active invitation.
• Removing someone else is admin-only, from the member list in ⚙ Settings, and works the same way: only once they're settled up. Tapping the × next to someone never removes them on the spot — it asks first, and tells you exactly what will happen. They keep their read-only copy of the history too.

• A balance looks off — tap the ↻ chip at the top of the hisaab. It recomputes from every single expense. (It also does this by itself once a day.)
• Someone can't see a hisaab — check the email they were invited with matches the Google account they're actually signing in with. Emails are always lowercased.
• A very long hisaab — the live list covers the most recent 300. Summary, category details and period CSV check the full history separately; older months are included. Balances use the running total, and Excel covers everything.
• Nothing loads and it just says “Loading Hisaab…” — that's a connection problem reaching Google's servers. It'll tell you after a few seconds.

A purchase explicitly sent from Divyadarshi can show Bank pending. It already counts in shared balances and can be settled. The label describes the bank authorization, separately from whether the shared entry saved.

If the bank posts the same purchase, its label changes without adding another expense. A posting-date-only change preserves the approved shared date and does not require bank-change review. Changed amounts or currencies, or removed authorizations, show a review warning. Nothing automatically changes shared money or undoes a settlement. Review with the person who imported it; correct the existing expense deliberately if needed. Any balance difference after a correction needs a separate settlement.

Deleting an expense or group in Hisaab keeps its history in the database. You can restore it later while you still have access.

• A deleted expense stays where it was, struck through, with Restore. It also collects under the 🗑 Recently deleted chip at the top of the hisaab.
• A deleted group moves to Recently deleted on the Groups tab with every expense intact. Choose View history to read it; any active, invited member can bring it back.
• An edited expense keeps its old values, shown as a before/after.
• Someone who leaves or is removed stays on every expense they were part of, by name, and keeps their own readable copy of the group.

Members can correct shared expenses. Review changes and balances together if something looks wrong. Validation catches many invalid entries, but it does not guarantee that every shared amount, split or balance is correct.

Your own copy, off our shelves

All of that still depends on this website and Google's database existing. On the home screen, tap your name → Backup everything: it downloads one JSON file with every hisaab and every expense you can currently access — including the deleted ones and the groups you've left. Store this file somewhere private; it contains readable financial history, without encryption.

Hisaab is invite-only. Invited participants can read their shared ledgers, including former participants while they remain invited. Google provides sign-in and Firebase stores and syncs ledger data; Cloudflare hosts the app and handles notification requests. If you enable notifications, your browser's push service delivers them.

Local-only is the default for optional AI. Typed entry, pasted Quick add and local summary answers run on your device. Local-only blocks Gemini requests and browser voice recognition, even if a key was saved earlier. It still allows the sign-in, shared-ledger sync and notification services above.

On the home screen, tap your name → AI privacy to change the mode or remove a saved key. If you enable external AI, each receipt upload, parser fallback, Gemini answer or voice action asks for fresh confirmation explaining what will be sent. Gemini receives the disclosed receipt, entry text or period brief; browser voice recognition may send audio to the browser's speech service.

The AI setting and saved key apply to this browser/device, across accounts. They do not sync to other devices or control other apps, extensions or older Hisaab versions. Data already sent cannot be recalled. Keep downloaded backups private too.