Say two people put $2,000 and $1,500 into a shared account, and the account pays $3,000 of bills. The household overview shows $3,500 of funding and $3,000 of spending. Contributions count as funding for the shared budget and never as household income or spending, so the total isn't $6,500.
A contribution is what one person agrees to put into a shared budget each month. For some people it is all the household sees of their money.
There are three ways to set the amount:
| Kind | How the amount is worked out |
|---|---|
| Fixed | The same amount every month. It reveals nothing about income. |
| Percentage | A share of the contributor's income, using only income they agreed to use. |
| Share of a target | The household picks a monthly target and splits it in proportion to each person's income. |
A percentage or a proportional share can let others work out someone's income from the amount. Setup and the contributions editor show what can be worked out before anything is saved. A change applies from the month you choose. Earlier months keep the amount they had.
Each month's contribution moves through three states:
- planned: the amount that was agreed
- reported paid: the contributor says they sent it
- received: Keel matched it to a transfer into the shared account, or someone confirmed it by hand
A shared bill the contributor paid directly can count toward their contribution, once. Partial payments add up. A receipt can be reversed later, and the history of it is kept.
When a store pays back a purchase that sits in a shared budget, the refund can be linked to it. A refund's dialog in Activity has a "Link to the purchase it refunds" action. Keel then lists shared purchases from the six months before the refund, in the same currency, in budgets you can change, that still have room to be paid back, and shows the split before anything is saved. A refund already assigned to a budget as its own entry isn't offered any purchases until that entry is removed. By default each budget gets back its share of the purchase, and the part no budget held stays where it was. The split can be changed, but no budget can get back more than it spent.
A linked refund reads "Refund linked to" and the purchase. A mistaken link can be taken back, which removes the whole refund from every budget it reached and frees it to be linked again. If one of those budgets changed in the meantime, Keel asks for a reload first.
Settlement tracking is optional. It shows who owes whom after one person pays for something the household shares. Households with one combined budget, or one person managing, start with it off. Recording a repayment never changes the household's spending: $120 of groceries stays $120 after one person pays the other back $60.