A guide for someone who has just installed it and has never used anything like it before. Ten minutes end to end; the first two sections are enough to be useful.
OweMe keeps track of who owes who when a group of people share costs — a holiday, a flat, a dinner. One person pays for something, you record it, and the app works out what everybody's share is and who is up or down overall.
It never moves money. There is no card, no bank account, no wallet, no payment. When you settle up you pay your friend however you already do — cash, bank transfer, whatever — and then tell the app you did. It is a shared notebook that does the arithmetic, not a payment app. That is deliberate, and it is why you never have to hand it any financial details.
Everything lives in a group. A group is just a name and the people in it — a holiday, a household, a regular dinner.
Then add the people. Tap the group, open the People tab, and add them by name — Sam from work is a perfectly good entry.
People do not need the app. You can add someone by name alone, and the app tracks their share exactly as it would anyone else's. If they install it later you can send them an invite and their whole history comes with them, including everything you recorded before they arrived. Nobody is left out for not having signed up.
From the group's People tab, or the Friends tab, tap Invite. You get a link and a QR code — the QR is the same link, and is the fast way to do it when the other person is standing next to you.
Treat the link like a key, because it is one: whoever opens it joins that group and can see everything in it. It only ever works for that one group, it expires on its own, and you can revoke it from the same screen. Tapping your own link twice does not use it up.
This is the thing you will do most.
The rounding is handled for you and always adds back to the exact total: a £10 bill between three people is 3.34 / 3.33 / 3.33, never 3.33 three times with a penny unaccounted for.
On the add-expense screen there is Scan receipt. Photograph the receipt (or pick a photo you already have) and OweMe reads the amounts off it.
The photo never leaves your phone — the reading happens on the device, which is why it works with no signal at all, and why there is nothing to upload. It is a premium feature, with 200 scans a month.
What comes back is a suggestion, never an entry. Every amount stays editable, and a total found next to the word TOTAL is shown differently from one that is merely the largest number on the page — only one of those is worth trusting without a second look.
Once a receipt is read you can tap Split by item. You get the list of things bought with everybody's name under each one; tap the names of whoever shared that item. OweMe turns the taps into one exact amount per person, and shows the running total against the bill so a misread line is obvious before you save it.
Nothing is assigned by default. This is the honest way to split a table where two people had the wine.
Rent, the internet bill, a shared subscription. Open the group and tap Recurring to set one up: the amount, who pays, how it splits, and how often — daily, weekly, fortnightly, monthly or yearly.
A schedule is not an expense. It holds no money and appears in no balance; what it does is create an ordinary expense each time it comes round, which you can then edit or void like any other.
Two things worth knowing:
Open a group and tap the Balances tab.
Each person shows one number: what they are owed overall, or what they owe overall. It is not a list of individual debts, it is the net position. If you paid for dinner and Sam paid for the taxi, the app nets those against each other rather than making you both pay each other.
The Home tab does the same across every group at once — the single number at the top is your overall position.
If a trip has euros and yen in it, you will see a euro balance and a yen balance. The app will not add them together, because converting means picking an exchange rate, and a rate you did not choose would silently change who owes what. Premium lets you set a rate per group if you want one combined figure.
When it is time to square up, open Balances and tap Settle up.
The app works out the fewest payments that clear everybody. With four people tangled up you might expect six transfers; it will usually find three. Follow the list.
Then pay them — cash, transfer, however you normally would — and tap Mark paid to record it. The balance updates.
Recording a payment is a statement: "I gave Sam £20." Nothing moved inside the app. If you tap it by mistake, open the person from the Balances tab and tap Undo. The record stays visible, marked as undone, so "why did my balance change?" always has an answer.
When somebody records a payment to you, it shows up under Awaiting you, and you can confirm it or dispute it.
This is the one place OweMe is deliberately two-sided. A balance that changed because somebody else said they paid you, with no way for you to say "no you did not", would be a shared ledger that only one person controls. Confirming is the normal case and takes a tap. Disputing does not delete anything or accuse anybody — it marks the record as not agreed, and leaves both of you looking at the same screen while you sort it out.
We are not the referee here. We only make sure you are both looking at the same thing.
When you mark a payment you can say whether it was cash, a bank transfer or something else. It changes no arithmetic at all. It is there because "did you give me that in cash?" is the question that comes up three weeks later.
Splitting, balances and settle-up are free forever. No tier gates the arithmetic — that would be a strange thing to charge for.
The free plan includes:
Premium adds five things: unlimited groups, unlimited history, receipt scanning (200 a month), offline mode on up to five devices, and currency conversion. There is also a one-off premium group — a single payment that upgrades one group for everyone in it, including people who have never paid. Good for one holiday.
If you have a code, enter it on the Premium screen under Restore purchases → Have a code?
Archiving does not free up your free group. The free plan is one group ever. Archiving hides it from the list; it still counts.
Deleting your account does not wreck your friends' balances. Your entries stay, attributed to a name rather than an account, so nobody else's arithmetic silently changes because you left.
A premium group does not unlock offline mode for you. Offline mode and receipt scanning belong to you, not to a group — offline mode keeps a copy of every group you are in, and scanning is a monthly allowance on your account. A group purchase unlocks the things that belong to the group: full history, currency conversion, no expense cap.
Nothing is ever really deleted. Voided expenses and undone settlements stay visible, marked. In a shared ledger, an entry that vanishes is an argument waiting to happen.
Four tabs along the bottom:
Activity, from Home, is everything that has happened across your groups, newest first. It covers expenses and settlements. It does not yet cover people joining or leaving, and the screen says so rather than quietly omitting them.
Two exports, both free:
Amounts come out as whole minor units with the currency code and its exponent, so a spreadsheet can total them without guessing where the decimal point goes.
The Help section under Profile answers the questions that come up most. If something here is wrong or unclear, that is worth reporting — a guide that misleads is worse than no guide.