Not everyone you split with will have Chit, and they don’t need to. You can add anyone with just a name, split receipts with them as usual, and send them a share card: an image showing what they had, what they owe and who to pay, which you send through any chat app. They don’t need to install anything or sign up to read it.
Placeholder contacts
When you add someone in Chit, you only need a name. Chit gives them a colour, used on their picture and on the lines that are theirs. This kind of contact is a placeholder: it’s a record on your phone (or in your account, if you have one), and it isn’t connected to anyone else yet. Chit never reads your phone’s address book.
You can put placeholder contacts on receipts, split lines with them, set rules for them, and keep a running balance with them, exactly like people who use the app.
What’s on a share card
A share card is a tall image in the same style as the app: thermal receipt paper, dotted lines and dot-matrix numbers. It says who it’s from, then has a section for each receipt, and ends with the total the person owes you. You can make one from a contact’s page, which selects all their unsettled receipts, or from a single receipt.
Before sending, you choose a style:
- Detailed: each receipt lists every item that person had, with shared items marked as shared. Good for a big shop where they’ll want to check.
- Compact: one row per receipt: the shop, the date, the receipt total and their share. It fits on one screen, which suits a list of smaller receipts.
When the card covers all their unsettled receipts, the final figure is your real balance with them: it takes off repayments you’ve already recorded and shows the subtotal and what’s been paid.
Only their own part
A share card contains only what concerns the person you’re sending it to. Each receipt shows their lines and their part of shared costs such as the bag charge. Other people’s items and shares aren’t included, so you can send a card to one flatmate without showing them what everyone else bought.
Payment details, if you want them
You can save some text with your payment details, such as your bank details or a payment link, and choose each time whether to put it on the card. It’s stored only on your phone. Chit never takes or sends payments; the card just tells your friend how to pay you.
The card also shows your name, so if you haven’t set one yet, Chit asks you for it first.
Sending it through any chat app
The card is made on your phone and handed to your phone’s share menu, so you can send it through whichever messaging app you use, by text message or by email, or save it to your photos. Chit doesn’t receive a copy, and the temporary image file is deleted once the share menu closes. Once sent, the image is like any other picture: the person can keep or forward it.
If you’d like a friend to use Chit too, you can also invite them from the app, which sends them a link to this website.
Linking their account later
If a friend signs up for Chit later, nothing you’ve recorded is lost. Add them as a friend by their username; once they accept, your placeholder contact for them is linked to their account. From then on, the receipts you send them appear in their own app, where they can check the photo and every line and confirm their share. Your balance with them carries on as before.
Related: see how to split a receipt by item, or go back to what Chit is.