travel dominated every trip page and said nothing. The tempting fix is a finer
travel taxonomy, which needs a hand-maintained merchant list — the trap #19
already describes — and it is also the wrong diagnosis.
travel is the only category that spans both phases of a trip. Every other one is
100% on-the-ground: on Europe 2026, dining, transport, entertainment, groceries
and shopping are all exactly $0.00 before departure. The chart was not bad, it
was two economies stacked into one, and travel was the only thing visible in the
union.
So split on start_date and use the axis that carries information in each phase.
Booked ahead ($22,050.51, 57%) is all flights and stays, so merchant is the axis
— Agoda $4,490, Air India $3,454, Luxury Escapes $3,284. On the ground
($16,946.94) travel falls to $8,241 among dining $4,452 and transport $2,938, and
category is finally worth charting.
The hero is the ratio, not a lone total, with the on-ground daily rate beside it
— the only figure comparable between trips, since totals are not: Europe
$677.88/day against Auckland $83.39. A trip with near-zero committed spend says
so, because Sonu + Sunny's $184.84 is a filing artefact (both legs' bookings sit
on the first trip), not a cheap trip.
Two dataviz rules this page was breaking. Category bars now use one copper hue
with the name as a direct label: the per-bar rainbow double-encoded identity the
label already carries, and the trip subset fails CVD validation on this surface
(other vs shopping at delta-E 5.0 protan, below the floor of 6). And the hero
figure drops the serif and tabular-nums, which read as decoration at that size.
The phase bar is two ordinal steps of one hue, validated with --ordinal against
the card surface, with a 2px gap so the boundary is an edge.
278 passing, build clean. Data verified against the database directly; I could
not render the page in a browser to eyeball the layout.
You were right and my label was wrong. A payment is allocated to a trip as a
lump sum, and the grouped-payment allocation gave each trip enough to clear the
payer's gross share. So netting the other side off leaves a fully-paid trip
negative by exactly what the payment over-covered: Europe reads -$802.75 because
Sonu paid $8,004.04 against a net share of $7,201.30. That surplus is already
carried in the overall balance, where she still owes $5,313.38 — nothing is owed
to her, and "you owe them" said the opposite.
The arithmetic never changed; only what the page claims it means. paid_to_me is
the discriminator: negative with a payment into the scope is over-coverage,
negative with no payment is genuinely owed because the viewer's share of the
other person's spending exceeds theirs. Both cases now tested. All three of
today's negatives are the first kind.
The trip table gains an Overall balance column from the unscoped participant
balances, because a single trip's figure cannot tell you whether to pay anyone,
and the footnote now says settlement is always against the overall figure.
278 passing, build clean.
Shared view: the query already returned owner_name and effective_category, the
table just never rendered them. Paid by sits next to Splits because together
they are whose money went out and whose share it was. Search is client-side —
this endpoint returns all 1,267 split rows in one request with no pagination, so
there is nothing for a round-trip to narrow, and the sort was already
client-side. It matches description, merchant, notes, category and payer, but not
participant names: the dropdown does that, and "sonu" matching every row she is
split on would read as broken.
Trip owed collapses to one settle-up figure per person, with the breakdown
beside it so the net is auditable rather than asserted.
I argued against netting a few hours ago and was wrong. The claim was that the
grouped-payment allocation cleared each trip against the one-directional gross,
so netting would redefine that debt after the fact. The rows say otherwise:
Europe's $802.75 is 56 transactions Sonu actually paid across Rome, Venice, the
Dolomites, Bellagio, Lucerne and Paris on which I hold 25%, and paid_by_me is
$0.00 on every row of every trip because nothing has ever been recorded going
from me to her. Her side looked settled only because the allocation derived her
payment split from her gross, so it lands on zero by construction. The
one-directional view was hiding a live obligation, not protecting an allocation.
Nets now: Auckland Sonu +$1,077.25, Europe Sonu -$802.75, Sonu + Sunny -$936.34,
Europe Molina -$816.16.
Also correcting an error in my own reporting: I said Auckland's mirror was
$0.00. It is $428.39 — 17 Auckland rows Sonu paid that I hold a split on. Two
ad-hoc verification queries mis-joined on a nullable scope column and
under-reported the mirror side. The app code was never affected and the owed
column is still byte-identical.
The footnote now states the trap the netting exposes: a debt settled by a payment
left on the household tab still reads as outstanding on the trip. Payment 5
(Molina to Sonu, $1,605.49) is exactly that case and is left alone as a data
decision.
277 passing, build clean.
Trips were scoped to trips.owner_id, so Sonu saw no trips at all — despite
having paid for 104 of the tagged rows herself. Her own spending was invisible
on the only page organised around it.
A participant is now anyone with a split on, who paid for, or whose payment is
scoped to, a transaction tagged to the trip. Derived, not stored. A
trip_participants table was designed and rejected: the expenses already carry
the fact, and two records of one fact drift apart. Deriving it also excludes
Singapore + Bangkok 2026 from Sonu for free, which a table would have to be kept
in sync to do. Siddharth 4 trips, Sonu 3, Molina 1.
Everything about a trip is shared except delete. Both trip foreign keys are
ON DELETE SET NULL, so deleting Europe 2026 untags 210 transactions and NULLs
the trip scope on 6 payments — where the hand-derived Europe-first allocation
lives, which nothing recomputes. That stays with the owner.
Trip owed now returns both directions and nets neither. An obligation lives on a
row someone else paid for, so a viewer-as-payer figure can never hold it, and
Sonu's Europe read "you are owed $2,408.24" while omitting the $8,004.04 she
owed. Collapsing the two into a signed net is the tempting next step and would
have corrupted the scope allocation: the grouped-payment allocation cleared each
trip against the one-directional gross, so redefining the debt afterwards turns
$8,004.04 already allocated into an $802.75 over-allocation with household
understated by the same amount. Verified byte-identical — Auckland $1,505.64,
Europe Molina -$816.16, Europe Sonu $0.00, Sonu + Sunny $0.00.
getTransactions gained trip_all_rows so a participant sees the whole trip. It is
opt-in and not implied by trip_id, because the same endpoint backs the main
transactions list and its trip filter must keep owner scoping. Participation is
re-checked in SQL, so passing the flag for someone else's trip returns nothing.
Payments can finally say what they settle. trip_id has existed since migration
0022 but POST never read it and GET never returned it, so every payment made in
the app landed on household and the 9 trip-scoped rows were hand-written SQL.
"Both" needs no new shape — one row per scope sharing a linked_transaction_id.
Three write paths had no authorisation at all and were reachable by any
participant: assignTransactionsToTrip checked nothing, DELETE on a payment
deleted by bare id, and POST accepted any from/to pair. All three now check.
Also fixes the test suite, which was pointing at postgres-pantry: container IPs
move on recreation and 172.22.0.47 stopped being postgres-personal. It only
failed safe because the credentials did not match — resetDB now refuses to
truncate anything not named personal_test.
22 new tests, 276 passing, build clean.
A participant who has overpaid a trip showed as "$-816.16" under a column
headed "Outstanding on this trip". A negative outstanding reads as a bug
rather than as "they are ahead", so the sign is now spelled out: magnitude
plus one of all square / owes you / ahead — you owe them, coloured the same
way Shared colours the same three states.
Also corrects the footer, which had gone stale and was now simply false. It
said settlement could not be computed per trip because payments carried no
trip attribution. Migration 0022 added split_payments.trip_id and the figures
above it have been net of trip-scoped payments since. What a reader needs to
know is the opposite of what it said: household-tab payments are the ones NOT
counted here.
Total Spend is every payer's trip-tagged spending; the split figures directly
below it are scoped to the owner. Two lenses on one screen read as one unless
the card says which it is. The number is unchanged and deliberate -- a trip
cost what the group put into it -- so this is a label, not a fix.
a4ab543 landed six hours ago and this branch rewrote one of the queries it
had just fixed, quietly dropping both of its guarantees.
That commit made EXCLUDE_RECONCILED_SOURCE "one fragment both sides import"
because an inlined copy is how the reconciled-row exclusion drifted out of
the analytics routes and double-counted 48 rows / $4,474.79. The trip owed
query here had hand-inlined its own copy — the fragment assumes the alias
`t` and this query used `tx`, so the path of least resistance was to
re-create exactly the divergence that was being removed. Aliased to `t` so
the fragments apply directly.
The same commit made balances count rows whose AUD value is unknown rather
than netting a foreign figure against AUD ones. The trip figure had no
equivalent — on the query where it matters most, because a trip is where
foreign rows actually live. A Europe total silently mixing EUR into AUD is
the whole failure that fix was written to prevent.
The column header still read "Share of this trip" while the number is now
net of payments, which is the same class of drift a4ab543 set out to fix.
It reads "Outstanding on this trip", carries the approx/unconverted caveat
the Shared cards use, and greys a settled zero.
The trip view showed Total Owed / Settled / Unsettled per participant, with the
last two derived from transaction_splits.settled. Nothing sets that flag - its
only writer was /api/splits/settle, which no UI calls - so it is false on all 673
splits and every trip reported 100% unsettled, including trips already paid in
full. Molina has paid $20,782.79 against $19,556.07 of splits and the Europe trip
still showed her entire share outstanding.
A correct per-trip figure is not computable either: split_payments records only
from, to, amount and date, so a payment cannot be attributed to a trip. The trip
view now shows each participant's share and points at Shared for what is actually
owed, which is where settlement genuinely lives.
Also removes /api/splits/settle. It was unreachable from the UI but live on its
URL, and a single call with participant_id would mark every one of that person's
splits settled - writing a flag nothing reads. Settlement will be reintroduced
against settlement contexts (docs/shared-expenses-design.md).
getParticipantBalances is deliberately untouched: it computes splits minus
payments, which is coherent. Excluding settled splits there while still
subtracting the payments that settled them would double-count.
App-wide retheme done at the token layer: Tailwind's zinc scale is remapped
to warm ink/paper neutrals and indigo to copper in globals.css, so every
page inherits the palette. Fraunces (serif display) added for page titles
and hero figures; all figures now render in mono with tabular numerals.
Analytics page redesigned around a month spine — twelve clickable columns
scaled to each month's spend that act as hero, context, and period
navigation. Adds a 'What changed' top-movers panel vs the previous month,
replaces the 8-line category trend chart with per-category sparkline small
multiples, heat-tints the six-month ledger table, and restyles the Pareto,
pace chart, and cashflow strip. Kept: Pareto, cumulative-vs-typical pace,
drill-downs, regular/occasional split.
Insights and Merchants restyled to the same kit; chart tokens centralised
in category-colors.ts (CHART). Cleared the pre-existing lint errors in
insights (typed tooltip, removed any-casts).
Adds trips table usage across API and UI: trip CRUD, per-trip analytics
(category/daily/merchant/tag/participant breakdowns), tag-to-trip
conversion, trip assignment via transaction overrides, and trip filter
in the transactions view. Recovered from working tree after local git
corruption; feature was already live via host-context Docker builds.
siddharthd