Why did we create Kindiro?

In two weeks, ten of us are going to Islay for a long weekend. Two hotels, a private driver picking us up from the ferry, eight distillery tours pre-booked between us, three nights, and one running joke that nobody can remember who paid for what.

We haven’t even left yet. That’s the thing.

That trip — the one we’re about to take, that we’ve been organising since February — is the reason Kindiro exists.

What we’re trying to organise

We started, like every other group of adults who’ve ever travelled together, with a shared spreadsheet. One column per person, one row per expense. Someone — usually Andrea — would add a row whenever a deposit went out: “Hotel A, room block, £640 on me.” A different person would update the totals. By week two of planning, it was already two days behind.

The bookings were the heavy hitters. The two hotels wanted full deposits up front. The taxi company asked for a 50% non-refundable hold. The distilleries each wanted a per-person tour fee, paid by one card, weeks in advance. By the time we were ready to confirm, four different people had paid for four different chunks of the trip — none of it was equal, and none of us was tracking it the same way.

We started this trip as eleven. We’re now ten. One of us had to pull out three weeks before departure. The hotel deposit had been split eleven ways in the spreadsheet; the taxi was sized for eleven; one of the distilleries had a minimum-group surcharge keyed off the same number. Reworking every row took an evening. Reworking it correctly — without anyone ending up under or over by a tenner — took another.

The thing that broke us

It isn’t the splitting that’s hard. Equal splits are arithmetic; we have phones with calculators. It’s three smaller problems that all stack:

• The spreadsheet goes stale within days. As soon as one person falls behind, the whole thing becomes suspect. Was that £180 distillery booking already in there? Did Marc add the ferry car-deck fee? Nobody wants to be the one to chase, so nobody does, and by the next week half of us aren’t sure what we owe.
• A single change ripples everywhere. Losing one person from the group meant rewriting almost every row in the spreadsheet. Equal-split lines had to be rebalanced; the per-person distillery fees needed redoing; the hotel block was suddenly oversubscribed. None of these are hard maths. Doing them all at once, by hand, without making a mistake — different story.
• The settle-up math is already complex, and the trip hasn’t started. Four people have fronted different deposits in different amounts. Two of those people owe money to a third for an unrelated booking. Working out who pays whom to zero everyone out — before we add a single dinner or pub round on the actual trip — is not the kind of problem you solve over WhatsApp on a Tuesday night.

We’re muddling through. Andrea’s still doing most of the chasing. Three of us have already paid forward without quite knowing if we’ll be paid back. And we haven’t even left.

Why not the existing apps?

We tried two of the popular ones over the planning weeks. They worked, sort of. But they’re built for a different shape of problem — recurring shared bills, household expenses, long-term roommate accounting. The trip-shaped use case (a defined start, a defined end, a small group of people who are friends rather than co-tenants, deposits paid in advance, and a clean settle-up at the end) was always two clicks too deep, or buried under an opinionated UI for tracking your monthly grocery spend.

The thing we wanted didn’t really exist:

• A trip is a unit. Open it, add expenses inside it (deposits now, dinners later), close it when you’re done. Don’t make me carry the trip context everywhere.
• It should hold an itinerary too. Half our pre-trip questions are “what time is the ferry?” and “which distillery is Friday afternoon?” — the same group, the same context, but separate apps. No good reason for that.
• Re-balancing should be one click, not an evening. When someone drops out, the app should redo the splits. Not me, in a spreadsheet, at midnight, hoping I haven’t shifted a decimal.
• Settle-up should be one tap. Not “show me the balances and let me figure out who pays whom” — actually compute the minimum-transfer plan, in the right currency, and show me the answer.
• It shouldn’t feel like accounting software. Ten friends planning Islay is not a finance department. The app should look and read like it was built by people who like trips, not people who like ledgers.

What Kindiro is

A small web app for groups of two to ten people going on short trips. You start a trip, invite the others, and add expenses as they happen — including the deposits and bookings that go out long before anyone leaves. Equal splits by default; uneven splits when you need them. If someone drops out, you remove them and Kindiro re-balances every affected expense in one go. The itinerary lives next to the expenses so the same trip is one place. At the end, Kindiro tells you the fewest transfers needed to settle up — across multiple currencies if the trip ran across borders.

It’s deliberately narrow. It’s not a general expense tracker, it’s not an accounting tool, it doesn’t do budgets or categories or receipts or any of the things a SaaS dashboard usually has. It does one thing — tracking who paid for what on a friends-trip, from the first deposit to the last pint, and reconciling at the end — and tries to do that one thing very well.

We built it because we wanted it. We didn’t want to maintain the spreadsheet for one more week. We didn’t want to argue with Splitwise’s UI for the third time. We wanted something that made the pre-trip chasing and the post-trip settle-up both a five-second tap, so we could go back to talking about whether the next trip should be Skye or Lewis.

What’s next

We’re in soft-launch with a small group of testers — most of them the same Islay crew, plus a few friends who’ve been very patient through “wait, can you try this build?”. The core flow works. The map view, itinerary, expense rebalancing, and multi-currency settle-up are all in. There’s a long list of small things we’d like to polish before we put it in front of a wider audience.

We’re going to dogfood it on Islay in two weeks. The deposits are already in there. The itinerary’s loaded. We’ll see whether the spreadsheet pain actually goes away, and we’ll write a follow-up about what worked and what didn’t — including the bits we got wrong and have to ship a fix for.

If you’d like to try it on a trip of your own, start one — it’s free for groups up to ten people, and we’d love to hear what works and what doesn’t. You can also connect Kindiro to Claude if that’s your thing — log expenses and ask “do I owe anyone?” without leaving the conversation.

The next post will be about the splitting logic itself — equal vs shares vs exact vs percentage, when each makes sense, and the small invariants that made the implementation harder than we thought. Until then.