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Balance and refund

The balance indicates how much each member must pay or receive from others. The application offers refunds to balance the amounts.

These propositions are only one way of repaying yourself; you are free to do differently. The balance detail screen allows you to have a better understanding of the balance.

Refund

When a member makes a refund, you must indicate it in the application.

  1. Either by clicking on the reimbursement indicated, then on "Mark as reimbursed." Or by creating a new operation of "transfers between members."
  2. Then the application will recalculate the next refunds.

It is possible that after a first reimbursement, the remaining refund proposals change drastically, it is because the application has found a better way to reimburse the members.

Balance detail

It's natural to want to understand why you owe or are owed money. This is why we created the balance detail.

  1. From the list of operations, select at the top the member whose details you wish to have
  2. Then under reimbursements, click on "Balance details."

You will find in this screen: your shares for each operation, the sum of what you have advanced to the others, and the sum of what you owe.

Optimizations

How does it work? The application will calculate how much each owes (some have spent more than others, and others owe money to the former) to find possible reimbursements.

Sesterce offers refunds to limit the number of exchanges to be made.

It may seem counterintuitive, but these optimizations are the strength of Sesterce: To save you time, don't worry because, in the end, everyone will have paid what they owe.

For example:

  • Pierre paid $30: split between himself, Sophie, and Thomas. Sophie and Thomas, therefore, owe Pierre each 10€.
  • Sophie paid $20: split between herself and Thomas. He owes Sophie 10€.

So we have:

  • Sophie owes Pierre $10 and must receive $10 from Thomas.
  • Thomas owes Pierre $10 and Sophie $10.
  • Pierre must receive $10 from Thomas and $10 from ‍Sophie.

This would make three refund transactions in total. While in reality, the accounts would be balanced with only Thomas giving $20 to Pierre. And this is what Sesterce will advise you, avoiding Sophie to receive and give money.

Refunds configuration

It is possible to modify the options for calculating refunds from the group settings. So you can, for example, specify that a person should collect and distribute the money to others. It is also possible to choose to round the amounts to be reimbursed; this eliminates the need to reimburse the cents and further simplifies the number of reimbursements to be made.