Eight friends, five days in Cyprus, and why we built kisir

How our trips used to end

I’m the person in my group of friends who ends up holding the money. Nobody chose me. I just once said “I’ll keep track,” and it stuck.

On our trips that meant this: someone pays for the villa, someone else for the car, a third person for every dinner because their card works and nobody else’s does. Somebody else pays for fuel, for a boat, for a round of drinks. I’d write it down in a notes app, then move it into a spreadsheet at home. Then I’d discover that half the dinners were missing, because they were in other people’s phones as photos of receipts.

The spreadsheet always had the same three problems:

• Not everything was for everyone. Two people skipped the boat. One person wasn’t at the bar. The birthday dinner was paid by the group for someone. Every exception was a new column, and I got one wrong every time.
• Nobody trusted it. If I’m the one who typed the numbers, and I’m also one of the people being paid back, the question is fair: “Did you count your own fuel twice?”
• The ending was a mess. Eight people, everyone owing a bit to everyone. If you pay back each expense separately, that’s dozens of transfers. Working out the few transfers that clear everything is real arithmetic, and I did it on a napkin.

We tried apps. The good ones wanted every person to create an account with an email and password, and with eight friends there are always two who simply won’t. None of them spoke Armenian. One told us to send someone 1,541,315.99 drams, and a dram has no cents.

So we built kisir. It started as one rule: anyone in the group chat should be able to join in ten seconds and add what they paid. Everything else followed from that.

The trip

The eight of us really did go to Cyprus for five days. To keep my friends’ privacy, the names, places and amounts below are an illustrative example of a trip like ours, not our actual ledger.

Eight friends, five days, a villa in Protaras on the east coast of Cyprus. We used two rental cars, did a boat trip to the Blue Lagoon, spent a day in the Troodos mountains and had one very long birthday dinner.

Before we flew, I made a group called “Cyprus” and dropped the link into our chat. Everyone tapped it, picked a name, and they were in. No sign-up. One friend joined the next morning at the airport, and that was fine too.

The rule was simple: whoever pays adds it, right then. Not in the evening, not at home. You pay, you take out your phone, you add it, you put the phone away. It takes about as long as putting your card back in your wallet.

What the money looked like

Here are the big expenses in the example, which is what decides who owes whom. There were plenty of coffees and ice creams too. They were added the same way, but this table shows the shape of the trip:

Three of these used to break my spreadsheet. They are exactly what kisir was built to handle.

The villa was paid in dollars. Lilit booked it on a site that charged her card $1,420. Her bank turned that into €1,236.40, not quite what the official rate would say. In kisir she entered the expense in dollars, the app filled in that day’s rate, and she changed it to the rate her bank actually used. The group runs in euros, and the ledger shows both numbers, so nobody had to take her word for it.

Not everything was for everyone. The boat was for six, the Troodos lunch for four, the bar night for six. For each one, whoever added it just unticked the people who weren’t there. There are no extra columns and no “remind me who went?” the next morning.

The birthday dinner. Ani paid, and it was split between the seven of us who were not Tigran. In a spreadsheet that’s the line that quietly comes out wrong. Here it’s one expense with one person unticked.

There was also a smaller win. Up in the Troodos mountains there was no signal for most of the afternoon. Tigran added the lunch anyway. It sat on his phone and synced when we drove back down.

How it ended: seven payments

On the last evening, kisir showed every person’s balance, who was owed, who owed, and how much. Lilit, who paid for the villa, was owed €791.47. Gor was the biggest debtor at €378.20, mostly because the villa and the cars were split eight ways and he’d only paid for fuel.

Then each of us opened Your plan: our own part of the shortest way to settle up. For the whole group it came to seven payments:

Eight people never need more than seven payments, and that’s what we got. Paying each expense back one by one would have taken more than fifty. Everyone sent their part from the airport, tapped to record it, and when the last balance hit zero the group closed itself.

No “wait, did you count the boat?” No one went quiet for a week because they felt they’d overpaid. The thing that usually spoils the last day of a trip simply didn’t come up.

What we learned using our own app

Using your own app on a real trip is humbling. Three things mattered more than we expected:

• Only you can edit what you added. Anyone can see every expense, but only the person who added it can change or delete it, and each one keeps a history of who changed what. Nobody had to wonder if someone quietly adjusted a number.
• The rate matters. Being able to type in your bank’s real rate, rather than trusting the official one, came up on day one.
• Notifications build trust. Seeing “Mariam added Fish meze, €486.50” the moment it happened did more for trust than any spreadsheet. People argue less about a number they saw appear in real time.

If you’re planning a trip

You don’t need kisir to do any of this. The habits are what matter:

1. Make the shared list before the trip, not after.
2. Whoever pays adds it on the spot.
3. When something isn’t for everyone, say so on that expense, not “we’ll sort it out later.”
4. Settle once, at the end, in the fewest payments.

The group trip guide has the method step by step. If your trip mixes currencies, read the multiple currencies guide.

We’ll write here about the next trips too, and about what we keep changing in the app because of them.