New Transfer Suggestion: Centralized Collection Mode

Here is a newly added transfer suggestion mode: Centralized Collection.

The original Decents transfer suggestions are designed to reduce the number of transfers between everyone. For example, instead of A paying B and C paying D separately, Decents calculates each person's net balance and automatically creates a simpler set of transfer suggestions.

It looks like this:

This works well for most shared expense scenarios. But over time, we have also received many suggestions, and a few complaints:

Sometimes, people do not actually want to settle up using the "fewest transfers" approach.

For example:

1. After a trip, the organizer collects everyone's payments first, then slowly pays back the people who covered expenses.
2. In a club or event ledger, there is already one person responsible for collecting and sending payments.
3. Members may not know one another well, so they do not want to transfer money back and forth between everyone.
4. During final reconciliation, they only want to confirm whether each person has paid the same collector.

So we added Centralized Collection mode.

How does centralized collection work?

After turning it on, transfer suggestions will change to:

1. People who need to pay first transfer money to the chosen collector.
2. The collector then pays the people who should receive money.
3. If the collector also has an amount to receive or pay, Decents merges that into the same set of suggestions.

For example, it looks like this, assuming everyone settles through foo.bar.test:

In other words, instead of everyone transferring money to one another, one member becomes the person in the middle.

This does not necessarily create the fewest possible transfers, but it makes collection management much simpler.

When should you turn it on?

If your shared expense flow already has an organizer, or if everyone is used to sending money to the same person first, this mode should fit the actual workflow better. It is especially useful for group trips, chartered cars, accommodation, event registration, club meals, and similar situations. In those cases, a ledger is not only about "how much each person pays or receives"; sometimes, having one main person handle the transfers is the more important part.

Now those amounts can be shown directly in Decents transfer suggestions.

Where is the setting?

Open the ledger, go to "Ledger Settings", turn on "Centralized Collection", then choose one member as the collector.

After it is enabled, the transfer suggestions page will show that the current mode is Centralized Collection and explain how the suggestions are calculated.

How to tell the difference

You can identify the current mode by the color indicator:

• Purple means automatic mode.

• Yellow means centralized collection.

Closing note

Many people have been asking for this feature for quite a while, so this release should save even more time.

If there are other settlement modes you would like to see, feel free to contact us.