Guides
Everyday money questions, answered properly.
Not tips and not tricks. These are the things that actually go wrong with household money — a shared cart, a faded slip, a month that got away — and what to do about each one.
The guides
Pick whichever one is your problem today.
How to split bills with roommates and settle up
The three fair ways to split a shared bill, why the arguments are almost never about the split, and a way of settling up that stops a hundred small transfers.
Thermal receipts fade
Why store receipts turn blank in a wallet, what you can still do once one has faded, and the one habit that makes the question stop mattering.
Returning something you bought
Returns are lost to the calendar, not the policy. The three dates that matter, what a shop needs from you, and where a refund lands in your books.
Receipts from a trip abroad, in two currencies
Why converting a trip’s receipts at today’s rate makes your books worse, and how to see what the trip cost in the money you spent.
Where the month went
Why a total at month end tells you nothing useful, the only comparison worth making, and four questions that turn receipts into something to act on.
How long to keep a receipt
A receipt has a job, and the job has an end date. The six reasons to keep one, how long each of them lasts, and the one almost everybody throws away too early.
Why these exist
Every one of them came from a real receipt.
ExpenseGauge reads receipts for a living, which means it meets the awkward cases constantly: the cart that was only half shared, the thermal slip that went blank in a wallet, the refund that arrived three weeks after the purchase and landed in the wrong month. These guides are what we learned from those, written so they are useful whether or not you ever use the app.