Settle up and simplify debts

After a trip, a month of shared rent, or a game-night snack run, balances accumulate. FairJar’s debt-minimization algorithm works out the fewest bank transfers needed to clear everything — no one has to do the mental gymnastics.

Open the Balances view

1. Open your group and tap Balances (or the balance icon in the header).
2. FairJar displays a list of optimized debt rows, each in the form “[Name] owes [Name] [amount]” — the result of the debt-minimization pass that reduces everything to the fewest possible payments.

How debt minimization works

Without simplification, a group of five people splitting many expenses can rack up dozens of individual IOUs. FairJar condenses all of them into the minimum number of payments — typically far fewer than the raw expense count — so everyone makes or receives at most one or two transfers.

For example: if Alice owes Carlos €5 and Carlos owes Dana €5, FairJar simplifies this to a single payment from Alice to Dana, cutting out the middle step.

Marking a debt as settled

Settling up is self-service — each person handles their own rows.

• On a row where you owe someone, tap I paid this back. FairJar removes the debt from your balance, and the person you paid sees their balance update too.
• On a row where someone owes you, tap They paid me back once you’ve received the money.

You don’t need to coordinate — just tap your own rows when the transfer has happened in real life (bank, cash, whatever works for your group).

Partial settlements

If you can only pay part of what you owe right now, you can add a new expense with yourself as the payer and set the amount to what you paid back, splitting it to the person you owe. This keeps the history accurate rather than silently zeroing out a debt.

Checking the history

All expenses, including any “settled” records, remain in the expense history. If there’s ever a dispute about what was paid, you can scroll back through the full timeline.

Ready to keep expenses flowing? Head back to Add an expense and split it, or learn about multi-currency expenses if your group splits costs in different currencies.