How to run a group kitty for a team, club or regular booking

For anything that repeats, stop splitting each session from scratch. Pick one treasurer, have everyone pay in ahead of time, take costs out of that pot, and keep the balance in a spreadsheet everyone can see. Paying per session only makes sense for small groups where attendance changes and nobody has to front the booking.

The alternative, where one person books the court or pays the league and then collects afterwards, works for about three weeks. After that the booker is permanently owed money by someone, and the group's finances live in their head. If that's you, the guide for people who always pay first explains why it's worth fixing.

Prepay, kitty or pay per session?

Shared streaming and app subscriptions are a different problem (one payer, a fixed monthly charge, nobody's attendance to track), covered in the guide to splitting shared subscriptions.

What the treasurer does

Pick the most reliable person, not the keenest. The job is small but has to be done every week:

• Keep the kitty apart from personal money, in a separate savings account or sub-account. It makes the balance easy to check and protects the treasurer if anyone ever asks questions.
• Log every payment in and out within a day, with a photo of the receipt.
• Post the balance in the group chat on the same day each month.
• Ask everyone to use the same message on their Swish payments, such as "Padel Q1" or "Team autumn", so payments can be matched to people. More on that in the guide to splitting bills with Swish.
• Hand over at the end of each season or year, with a balance that matches the account to the krona.

Clubs that expect to run for years sometimes form an ideell förening (a non-profit association) so the money can sit in an account in the group's name. For a padel group or a dinner club, that's more admin than it's worth.

The spreadsheet

Three tabs are enough. "In" lists every payment received: date, who, amount. "Out" lists every cost: date, what, amount, and a link to the receipt. "Balances" has one row per member showing what they've paid in, their share of costs so far, and the difference. Everyone can view it; only the treasurer edits it. Once a month, check that the total in the sheet matches the account. If it doesn't, find out why that week, not at the end of the season.

Padel and tennis: the weekly court

One person books the court in the venue's app and pays for it up front. Say it costs 600 kr for 90 minutes, so 150 kr each for four players. Some booking apps let each player pay their own share when they join the booking. If yours does, use it and you may not need a kitty at all.

If not, and the group is a pool of six people who take turns filling four places, have everyone pay 600 kr into the kitty and charge 150 kr per session to the four who played. After four sessions it might look like this:

Sixteen places at 150 kr is 2,400 kr spent, leaving 1,200 kr in the kitty. One rule keeps it running: when your balance is below the cost of one session, you top up another 600 kr before you play again. Anna tops up this week.

No-shows follow the venue's own cancellation window. Drop out in time for someone else to take your place and you pay nothing. Drop out after that, or simply don't turn up, and you're charged your 150 kr as if you'd played. The three who did turn up shouldn't each pay 200 kr for your empty place. The same logic, applied to bigger bookings, is in the guide to last-minute cancellations.

A five-a-side season

Here is an illustrative autumn season for a ten-player squad:

That's 1,250 kr a player. Collect 1,400 kr each instead, 14,000 kr in total, which leaves a 1,500 kr buffer for the things nobody budgets for: an extra pitch slot for a rescheduled match, a replacement ball, a fine for a walkover. Decide before collecting whether whatever is left at the end of the season gets paid back or rolls into next season's fee. Collect the fee before you register the team: no payment, no place on the squad list.

Keep kit out of the kitty. Shirts and shorts are personal and players keep them, so each player pays for their own even if the treasurer orders them in one batch. Otherwise someone who leaves in October ends up arguing over a share of ten shirts.

The post-match dinner is a separate thing too. That's a single receipt, and scanning it with Qvitt lets everyone tap what they ate and pay whoever covered the bill. Qvitt doesn't keep a running kitty balance, though, so the season money stays in the spreadsheet.

When someone quits mid-season

Almost every team cost is fixed for the season. The league entry and the referees cost the same with nine players as with ten. So by default, a player who leaves gets nothing back straight away, only their share of whatever is left in the buffer at the end.

The exception is a replacement. Say a player leaves after six of the twelve matches and a new player joins for the rest. The newcomer pays half a season's share, 625 kr, and that goes to the player who left. If 1,000 kr of the buffer remains at the end of the season, it is split between the ten who paid into it: 100 kr each, the leaver included.

Two season tickets, four friends

Say four friends buy two season seats together at 3,200 kr each (illustrative) for a season of 16 home games. That's 6,400 kr, or 1,600 kr each, and 32 seat-games, or eight each. Each game works out at 200 kr.

Hand out the games with a snake draft before the season starts: pick in the order 1, 2, 3, 4, then 4, 3, 2, 1, and so on until everyone has eight. Whoever gets first pick of the derby picks last in the next round, which stops the best games always going to the same person.

If you can't make one of your games, offer it to the other three first, then pass it on within the club's rules on transferring season-ticket seats (check them; some clubs limit resale). Anything you get for it is yours, since you paid for that game. Cup and play-off matches often aren't included in a season ticket (check what yours covers), so whoever wants to go buys those separately.

A dinner club with a rotating host

Six friends, one dinner a month, and the host cooks. "The host pays and it all evens out" only works if everyone hosts equally often and cooks to a similar standard. Sooner or later one person makes beef Wellington and another makes tacos, and the person who made Wellington notices.

Agree a fixed amount per guest instead, say 200 kr for food, with guests bringing the wine. Each of the five guests Swishes the host 200 kr, giving the host 1,000 kr plus their own 200 kr to cook for six. Going over budget is the host's choice and the host's cost. Someone who can't host, because of a tiny flat or no oven, can co-host with someone else or bring the wine every time instead. A member who cancels before the shopping is done pays nothing; one who cancels after it pays their 200 kr.

A band's rehearsal room

Rent is fixed, so it's split equally whoever turns up. If the room costs 3,600 kr a month and there are four of you, that's 900 kr each by standing order on payday, straight into the band's account. Gig fees go into the same account first, to cover rent and gear, and only what's left over gets paid out.

Shared gear bought with band money, like a PA or microphones, belongs to the band. Agree now what a member who leaves gets for it: nothing, or a share of what the gear would sell for second-hand. Someone who quits should give the same notice the band has on the room's contract and pay their rent until it runs out.