Sorayli for families: one plan, a private ledger for each person

The Family plan is one subscription that covers you and up to four other people. It costs $17.99 a month or $129.99 a year (see plans and prices). Each person signs in to their own Sorayli account, scans their own receipts and keeps their own ledger. What the five of you share is the plan itself and its fair-use limit. The spending stays separate.

Say that part first, because it is the question most households have: the Family plan is not a joint ledger. Two people cannot write into one list of transactions and both read it. If that is what you need, this plan will disappoint you. If what you need is for everyone in the house to track their own money properly without five separate bills, read on.

01What is shared and what stays yours

The features a member gets are the Family plan's: unlimited receipt scans, as many budgets as they want, unlimited questions to the assistant and the advanced analytics. Unlimited means there is no monthly allowance to run out of. There is a fair-use ceiling, and on Family it is one pool: 800 scans a month counted across everyone, not 800 each, and assistant questions share a separate pool the same way. A Pro subscriber on their own has a scan ceiling of 300. For a normal household that ceiling is far away, but it is a real number, so it is written here.

Nothing about a member's data moves when they join. Their transactions stay in their own account, where they were. For the longer version of what happens to your data, see how Sorayli handles your data.

02How invites and seats work

The person who pays is the owner. The owner has five seats including their own, so there is room for four other people. Invites are created and redeemed in the iPhone app, under Settings, then Family. The web app has no family screen, though once someone has joined, the plan applies to their account when they sign in on the web too.

1. 1The owner opens Settings, then Family, and taps Invite someone. The app creates a code and opens the share sheet.
2. 2The code is eight characters, shown as two groups of four, like ABCD-EFGH. It leaves out 0, O, 1, I and L, so it survives being read aloud or typed from a screenshot. The shared message also carries a sorayli.com/join/ link. That page has a button that opens the app's Family screen with the code filled in, and an App Store link for someone who does not have the app yet.
3. 3The other person signs in to their own Sorayli account, opens Settings, then Family, enters the code and taps Join.
4. 4From then on their account runs on the owner's plan. The owner's list shows their name and a masked email, such as l•••@example.com.

A few rules sit behind those steps. Each code works once, and it expires 14 days after it was created. An open invite holds a seat while it waits, so four unused invites fill the family just as four members would. The owner can withdraw an invite that has not been used, which frees its seat straight away. When all five seats are taken or invited, the app says so and asks the owner to remove someone first.

03What the Family plan does not do

These are the gaps people most often assume are filled. None of them are.

• No shared ledger. There is no household view that adds everyone's spending together. Each person sees their own totals only.
• No visibility into other people's spending. The owner sees who is on the plan, not what they buy. That includes a partner, a parent or an adult child.
• No shared budgets. A budget belongs to the account that created it and counts that account's spending.
• No bill splitting or settling up. Sorayli will not work out who owes whom. The method below does that with a pen and a monthly total.
• No automatic cancellation of a member's own subscription. If someone already pays for Pro or Family and then joins, their own plan keeps running and keeps charging. The Family screen tells them this, with the renewal date. They cancel it themselves where they bought it (the App Store, or the web billing page), and the family plan takes over when it ends.
• No bank connection, for anyone. Every account records spending the same way: a receipt scan or a typed entry.

04A family expense tracker without bank sync

If you came here looking for a family or couples budget app that doesn't link your bank, this is where Sorayli differs from most. Apps built around a joint household view usually work by connecting everyone's accounts, or by sharing one login. Sorayli connects to no bank for anyone, so nobody in the household hands over bank access. Each person scans or types their own purchases, and the household picture comes from adding up totals, as below.

For two people splitting shared costs, including how to split in proportion to income, see how to budget as a couple without sharing bank logins.

05Running household money with separate ledgers

Separate ledgers sound like a problem for a shared household. In practice they work well if you agree on one rule and one monthly habit. This works with any tracker, or with a notebook.

1. 1Whoever pays records it. If you paid at the till, the receipt goes in your ledger, whole, even if half the basket was for someone else. Nobody else records it. That rule is what stops double counting.
2. 2Agree on categories for shared costs. Pick the handful your household cares about, for example Food & Dining, Shopping, Transportation and Personal Care, and have everyone file shared spending under the same names. If you want a Kids or Pets category, each person adds it to their own account with the same name; custom categories work on every plan.
3. 3Once a month, each person reads out their category totals. Add them up on paper or in a shared note. That sum is the household's month.
4. 4Settle up outside the app. If one person carried more of the shared costs, the other sends the difference. The person receiving it can record it as income, so their own ledger stays honest.

The rule about recording whole receipts is where line items earn their keep. A mixed trip to the store is rarely one category. Here is one parent's Saturday run.

Read by category, that one receipt is four different kinds of spending. Food & Dining comes to $23.68 (4.29 + 5.97 + 3.58 + 9.84). Shopping is $33.87: the diapers at $24.99, less the $3.00 store-card discount, plus $11.88 of cat food. Education is the $3.29 of glue sticks for school, and Personal Care is the $6.99 shampoo. Those four add to $67.83, and the $2.65 of tax brings it to the $70.48 on the card slip.

If this were logged as one $70.48 grocery purchase, the household would think it spent $70.48 on food. It spent $23.68 on food, about a third of the total. When Sorayli scans a receipt, each line gets a suggested category you can change before saving, so the split above happens when you save, not at the end of the month.

At month end, each person opens their own ledger and reads out the category totals. A two-adult household might end up with something like this:

If you agreed to share these costs evenly, each of you owes $652.73. You paid $778.66, so your partner sends you $125.93. That is the whole settling-up step. For receipts shared between people who don't share a household, the same arithmetic works line by line; see how to split a grocery receipt with roommates. For the rest of the monthly sit-down, see how to do a monthly money review.

Each person can also set their own budgets for their share. Budgets in Sorayli are monthly limits per category, and on the Family plan there is no cap on how many each person keeps. They count only that person's spending, which suits the whoever-pays-records-it rule: your Food & Dining budget tracks what you spent at the till.

06When someone leaves, or the plan stops

• A member can leave at any time from the Family screen. They go back to their own plan, which for most people is Free, and their data stays exactly as it was.
• The owner can remove a member. The same thing happens: that person is back on their own plan, and their transactions and receipts stay with them.
• If the owner's Family subscription ends, every member falls back to their own plan automatically, which for most people is Free. Their data is untouched.
• Free means 10 receipt scans and 10 spending questions a month and up to 2 budgets. Budgets someone already has are not deleted if they are over the Free limit.

07When the Family plan pays for itself

The comparison is against each person buying Pro. Pro is $9.99 a month or $69.99 a year. On yearly billing, two people on Pro already cost more than one Family plan.

On monthly billing the numbers are close for two people: $19.98 for two Pro plans against $17.99 for Family. From three people up, Family is clearly cheaper.

Two honest caveats. First, not everyone needs a paid plan. Someone who types in a few purchases a week and scans a handful of receipts may be fine on Free, which allows unlimited typed entries; see Sorayli for students for how far Free goes. Second, the scan pool is shared. Two heavy scanners on separate Pro plans each get a 300-scan ceiling; on Family, everyone draws from 800 together. For most households that is plenty. For a family where several people scan business receipts all month, check it before switching.