This guide walks you through every screen and every button, with real examples you can follow along. If you're brand new, start at Part 1. If you already know the basics, jump to the chapter for your house type.
From installing the app to running your first house — the essentials, step by step.
If you live in a mess, hostel or shared flat, you already know the monthly headache: who ate how many meals, who bought the bazar, who gave money to the manager, and who owes whom at month-end. Bachelors' Meal Manager does all of that arithmetic for you.
Everyone in the house shares one live picture. You log your meals, the manager logs the bazar and the money, and the app keeps every person's balance up to date every second — so nobody argues, and month-end takes zero calculation.
Open the app and you'll land on the welcome screen. You can sign in with an email & password or with Google — both sit side by side, use whichever you like.
Everything in the app lives inside a house (your mess). The first time you sign in you have two choices:
Tap Create house. You give it a name, choose its type (see 1.5), and you instantly become its manager. The app gives the house a unique House ID you can share so others can join.
Tap Search house, paste the House ID a housemate gave you, check the details, and send a request to join. The manager approves it and you're in.
Let's follow a real join from both sides. Say Ziad wants to join Green Mess, whose manager is Mehenaz.
When Mehenaz taps Confirm, the app adds Ziad as a person and then offers to add him to the meal Members list too — and this is where the name-match helper shines:
The dialog pre-fills the joiner's name ("Ziad") and scans the existing members. Because Green Mess already has a member called Ziad, it shows an ⚠ Possible match already in members: Ziad warning and highlights that member's chip in orange.
This stops you creating a duplicate. If the person already has a member slot (they do here), tap Skip — the app keeps the existing "Ziad" slot. If they're genuinely new, tap Add as member.
When you create a house you pick how meal cost is worked out. This one choice shapes the whole month, so here's the plain-English difference.
After you're in a house, the Dashboard is home base. Here's the manager's view of our demo house, "JU Meals". Every number you see updates live.
The top bar also holds three icons: PDF export, the Recalculate calculator, and Share.
The classic mess model, where the app works out the true cost per meal from your real bazar and meals. We'll use the demo house "JU Meals" throughout.
In a calculated house there's one number that everything hangs on — the cost per meal. At any moment it's simply:
From that, each person's month comes down to three lines:
This table on the dashboard is the heart of the app. Each row is one member, and the columns break down exactly how their balance is built:
| Column | What it shows |
|---|---|
| Total | Meals + special meals (e.g. 19.5+3). |
| Cost (৳) | Meal cost + special + utility share. |
| Deposit (৳) | Own bazar + money given to manager. |
| Balance (৳) | Deposit − Cost. Green if in credit, red if owed. |
The little grey a+b line above each bold total shows how it was built, so nothing is a mystery. In 3.3.0 the row figures are lined up along the bottom and the balance is aligned on its decimal point, so you can skim a whole column at a glance.
Any column heading is a sort button. Tap once to sort by it (low → high); tap again to flip the direction (high → low). The active column shows a little ↑ / ↓ arrow.
Tap any row in the table to open that person's full story. It opens on the Balance tab — the same three-line maths from §2.1, shown as a tidy sum for that one person.
The Meal tab is a grid: members down the side (each split into B.Fast / Lunch / Dinner), days across the top. To log meals, tap the red + Add.
Adding for one person is free; adding for several at once may show a short ad in the live app.
Typed the wrong number, or logged a meal for the wrong day or person? Nothing is stuck — every meal figure can be corrected, and each change is kept in the Edit History. There are two ways to fix it:
The total for that member updates instantly, and the change is recorded in the Edit History.
Sometimes you cook something fancy — a feast, a guest night — that shouldn't be priced like an ordinary meal. That's a special meal: it has its own rate for that day, split only among the people who joined it.
Open Add meal and switch the top toggle to ★ Special. Set the special meal rate for that date, choose how many each person had, and tick the members. Their special-meal cost is added on top of their normal cost, and it shows separately in the table (the +3 in the Total column, the middle number in Cost).
Special meals get their own History and Edits log too, reached from the same star icon — see Seeing your special meals below.
A special meal is kept separate from the ordinary meal grid, so it never appears as a number in those B.Fast / Lunch / Dinner boxes. That is why people log one and then think it vanished. It has its own page, and the way in is the star in the Meal tab's top bar:
The Bazar tab is the shopping ledger. Each entry records what was bought, how much, and — crucially — who paid.
When you add a bazar item you choose Money From:
Wifi, gas, the cook's salary, electricity — costs that aren't food. Tap the Utility toggle in the add screen. Enter the total, pick a type, and choose exactly who shares it. The app divides it evenly among them.
Nothing is ever silently changed or lost. Tap the chevron on any bazar or manager entry to expand it and reveal three actions:
Edit changes an entry and keeps a full History of what it was before (so an edited item is tagged Edited*). Delete moves it to the Trash rather than destroying it. And Month History (top-right) lets you browse any past month's bazar, meals and money as a read-only record.
New in 3.3.0: set up whose turn it is to do the bazar each day, so nobody has to ask. Open it from the little pencil on the dashboard's "Bazar today" line.
The Manager tab records money members hand to the manager (the "collection"). Each entry says who gave how much, when, and who logged it.
This money is each person's deposit. Balance is what's left after their cost, so a big deposit means a healthy green balance. Like bazar, entries can be edited (with history) or trashed.
The House tab is where you manage who's in the mess. It has three sub-tabs.
Permissions let the manager decide who can add meals, edit meals, add bazar, manage people, or grant permissions — so you can share the load without handing over the whole house. Members can also request a permission and the manager approves it (§4.3).
Tap Analyse on the dashboard for the visual story of the month: the key totals, a cost-per-meal trend, every member's balance as a bar, and a meal-share donut.
After a shaky connection or a lot of edits, tap the calculator icon in the top bar to Recalculate. It rebuilds every total from the raw entries and then shows you a reassuring balance check.
The result dialog spells out the house balance — collection minus the manager's bazar, utility and special-meal spending — and confirms it matches the sum of all member balances. When it says “Balanced”, your books are provably correct.
Tap the PDF icon to turn the month into a shareable report — perfect for pinning on the notice board or sending to the group.
The summary (totals, cost-per-meal, collection, remaining money) is always included; the tick-boxes add the detailed meal grid, the bazar list, the manager-money list and the analysis charts. The PDF supports different currency symbols and languages correctly.
Everything is tracked per month. The house sits on one "current month" that the whole house shares, and only the manager can change it (from the pencil on the house card).
When a new calendar month arrives, the app gently nudges the manager to switch. You can always go back to a past month to fix something — a persistent amber banner reminds you when you're viewing a month that isn't the current one. Members see past months as read-only.
Same app, same screens — but the cost of a meal is a number the manager sets, not one the app derives. We'll build a demo house, "Green Mess", at ৳45 a meal.
Here there's no "bazar ÷ meals". The manager decides one price per meal for the month, and every person's meal cost is just:
Deposit and balance work exactly as before (deposit − cost). The big difference is what happens to bazar: since the meal price is fixed, pooled/manager bazar no longer sets the rate. A member's own bazar still counts as their credit.
| Calculated house | Fixed house | |
|---|---|---|
| Cost per meal | Worked out: bazar ÷ meals | Set by the manager (e.g. ৳45) |
| Manager / pooled bazar | Raises the cost per meal | Doesn't change the rate |
| A member's own bazar | Their credit (deposit) | Their credit (deposit) |
| Utility & special meals | Same — added to Cost | Same — added to Cost |
| Balance | Deposit − Cost, in both | |
We set the rate to ৳45, added five members, gave everyone breakfast+lunch+dinner for the day (3 meals each), recorded different manager deposits, and let Jamal buy ৳400 of bazar himself. Watch it all land on the dashboard:
Notice how the fixed rate flows straight through: nobody's cost depends on how much anyone else spent. Jamal's own ৳400 bazar simply boosts his deposit, so his balance is comfortably green.
Members and money are added exactly as in a calculated house — same Meal grid, same Manager tab.
The bits that work the same in every house — and how to make the app yours.
The Profile tab is your personal corner. Your username and email are visible to housemates; tap your Profile ID to copy it. There's also a built-in “How to use the app” tour if you ever want a refresher.
Currency — pick your symbol (Taka ৳ by default); it's used everywhere, including the PDF.
Meal reminders — two daily nudges (default 3:00 PM and 9:00 PM) so you never forget to log your meals. You can move the times, but they stay on so the house data stays complete.
Under Appearance, choose Light, Dark, or System default. Dark mode is fully designed — not just inverted — so it's easy on the eyes at night.
You don't have to be the manager to help run the house. A member can request the permissions they need, and the manager approves them in a tap. Here's the full round-trip.
On the House card, a member taps Request permissions. The dialog lists only the permissions they don't already have — tick the ones you need and tap Send request.
The manager sees the member's name and the requested permissions, and grants them all in one tap (or denies). Granting flips those switches on in the Permissions sub-tab immediately, and the banner clears.
A house doesn't need a designated manager. If the person who is manager leaves without appointing anyone, the house simply becomes a no-manager house — and then everyone acts as manager: any member can switch the month, edit the rota, manage people, and so on.
Tap What's New to see the highlights of each update, About for the version and contact links, and How to use the app for a quick guided tour of every feature any time you need a refresher.
Log out lives at the bottom of the Profile tab, under Account (alongside Reset password and Delete account). Your house data is safe on the server — logging back in brings it all straight back.
| Question | Answer |
|---|---|
| Someone's balance looks wrong. | Open their detail page and read the sum. Still off? Tap the calculator to Recalculate (§2.12). |
| Can I change my house from calculated to fixed? | No — the type is set at creation. Create a new house for the other model. |
| Our manager left. Are we stuck? | No. The house becomes a no-manager house where everyone can manage, and anyone can claim the role (§4.4). |
| I deleted a bazar entry by mistake. | It's in the Trash (top-right of the Bazar tab), with who deleted it and when. |
| How do I invite someone? | Share House ID on the dashboard, or send them the House ID to search. |
| Two people with the same name? | Member names must be unique — the name-match helper warns you, and you can use "Ziad1", "Ziad2" style names. |
| Word | Meaning |
|---|---|
| Member | A meal name the house tracks (may or may not have an app account). |
| Person / People | A real app account that has joined the house. |
| Manager | The person who runs the house — switches months, sets the fixed rate, manages people. A house can also run with no manager. |
| Bazar | Shopping for the house (groceries, food). |
| Deposit | What a person put in: their own bazar + money given to the manager. |
| Cost | What a person owes: their meals × cost-per-meal, plus utility and special meals. |
| Balance | Deposit − Cost. Green = in credit, red = owes. |
| Cost per meal | Calculated house: bazar ÷ meals. Fixed house: the rate the manager set. |
| Utility | Non-food shared bills (wifi, gas, cook, electricity), split among chosen members. |
| Special meal | A higher-cost meal with its own rate, split only among those who joined it. |
Bachelors' Meal Manager · Version 3.3.0 · Developed by RED Z APPS. This guide was produced from the live app; your screens may differ slightly as the app improves.