Meal Manager

1.1 · What this app does for you#

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.

1.2 · Create an account & sign in#

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.

1.3 · Create a house — or join one#

Everything in the app lives inside a house (your mess). The first time you sign in you have two choices:

Create a brand-new house

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.

Join an existing house

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.

Members vs. PeoplesA house has Members (the meal names it tracks — e.g. "Rahim", "Karim") and Peoples (the real app accounts that have logged in). One person can be linked to one member slot. You can add member names even for housemates who haven't installed the app yet.

1.4 · Join requests & the clever name-match helper#

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.

How the match worksIt flags a name if it's an exact match, one contains the other, or they share a whole word of 3+ letters. So "Md Rahim" would flag an existing "Rahim", but common short bits like "Md" won't trigger a false alarm.

1.5 · The two kinds of house#

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.

1.6 · Your dashboard & the six tabs#

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.

• 1House card — name, type, the manager, and the current month. The pencils let the manager rename, hand over, or switch month.
• 2Share House ID — sends an invite link so people can join.
• 3Total meals today — a live tally of today's breakfast / lunch / dinner across the house.
• 4Bazar today — whose turn it is to shop (the rota, §2.8).
• 5Deposit · Balance · Cost/meal — the house's headline numbers, plus the Analyse button for charts.
• 6Member Stats table — every member's meals, cost, deposit and balance. Tap any row for their detail.

The top bar also holds three icons: PDF export, the Recalculate calculator, and Share.

2.1 · How the maths works#

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:

2.2 · The Member Stats table & sorting#

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.

Sorting — tap a heading

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.

2.3 · A member's detail page#

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.

2.4 · Adding meals (and half meals)#

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.

1. Pick the date (defaults to today).
2. Set Breakfast / Lunch / Dinner with − and +. Tap a number to type it — fractions like 0.5 are allowed for half meals.
3. Tick every member the meal is for (or tick the header to select all).
4. Tap Add.

Half mealsAte only half a dinner? Type 0.5. The app counts it as half a meal in every total and cost.

Adding for one person is free; adding for several at once may show a short ad in the live app.

Entered a meal wrong? Two ways to fix it

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:

2.5 · Special meals#

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 page, History and Edits log, reached from the star icon on the Meal tab.

ExampleEid lunch cost ৳300 a head and eight people joined. Log it as a special meal at ৳300 — those eight each pick up ৳300, and the four who skipped it pay nothing extra.

Two ways a special meal gets its price

Typed by hand — you set the rate yourself, as above. The card says fixed rate.

Worked out from its shopping — new in 4.0. File a bazar trip against the day (§3.4) and the app divides that shopping between the meals on it. The card says from N bazar items, and you can open it to see the receipt behind the number.

Kept out of the ordinary rateSpecial-meal shopping is deliberately excluded from the month’s cost per meal. One Eid dinner should not make every plain lunch in the month look expensive — so it is charged only to the people who ate it.

Deleting a day takes its special bazar with it, and credits the money back to whoever paid — the dialog names the items and the amount before you agree.

2.6 · Bazar & utility bills#

The Bazar tab is the shopping ledger. Each entry records what was bought, how much, and — crucially — who paid.

Who paid? (Money From)

When you add a bazar item you choose Money From:

• Manager — bought from the shared pool. This is normal house spending; it feeds the cost-per-meal.
• A member's name — that person paid out of their own pocket, so it counts as their deposit (a credit to them).

Utility bills — split fairly

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.

ImportantUtility is not part of the cost-per-meal (it isn't food). It's added to each sharer's Cost separately — that's the third number in the meal+special+utility breakdown.

Try itThe ৳600 wifi bill arrives. Add a Utility, type "Wifi", enter 600, and leave everyone ticked — each person picks up ৳600 ÷ (number of people). If someone was away all month, just untick them.

2.7 · Edit history, month history & trash#

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.

2.8 · Bazar Today — the shopping rota (with reminders)#

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.

2.9 · Manager money#

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.

Try itKarim gives the manager ৳1000 for the month. Open Manager → + Add, tap Karim, type 1000, Add. His deposit — and balance — jump by ৳1000 instantly on the dashboard.

2.10 · The House page & permissions#

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).

2.11 · Analyse — charts & trends#

Tap Analyse on the dashboard for the visual story of the month. Rebuilt in 4.0 around one idea: the month should add up two different ways, and you should be able to see that it does.

The three tiles at the top are the month in one line: total meals (split normal / special), total bazar (split members’ own money / the manager’s), and the cost per meal with the division that produced it.

Manager collection − Spending = Balance

What the manager took in, minus what they spent, broken into bazar, utility, special bazar and fixed-rate special meals.

Members paid in − Charged = Balance

The same month from the other end: what the house handed over (to the manager, plus their own bazar), minus what it was charged (meals, utility, special meals).

The pointBoth cards land on the same balance. If they ever disagree, something is wrong — and the two breakdowns underneath tell you which side to look at.

Cost per meal trend — this month against the months before it, with the change stated in plain words ("87% vs last month · costlier").

Bazar by day and Meals by day — a column per day of the month, with the special-meal part stacked on top in violet so a feast day is obvious at a glance. Scroll them sideways for the whole month.

Top items by cost — what the house actually spends on, largest first. Written differently by different people — চাল, chal, rice — and counted as one thing anyway.

Export PDF sits at the bottom of the page, and the month picker at the top lets you read any past month the same way.

2.12 · Recalculate & the balance check#

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.

When to use itAny time the numbers look off, or once at month-end before you settle up.

2.13 · Export a PDF report#

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.

2.14 · Months & switching months#

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.

Carry forwardStarting a fresh month, the manager can carry each member's ending balance into the new month so credits and debts aren't lost.

3.1 · The problem this solves#

Adding bazar after you get home means remembering eleven prices from a crumpled receipt, on a screen, an hour later. Half the time a line gets forgotten and the month is quietly wrong.

So 4.0 splits shopping into the two things it actually is: deciding what to buy, which the whole house does over several days, and buying it, which one person does in one hour with no signal. They are now two screens, and neither one touches anybody's money until the very end.

3.2 · The Bazar Note — anyone can write what the house needs#

Open it from the Bazar note button on the Dashboard, or from the Bazar tab. Type what is finished — Chal 5kg, Peyaj 2kg — and tap +.

It is a draft. Nothing on it is counted, costed or charged to anybody, so add and remove freely. The badge on the Dashboard button shows how many things are waiting.

No permission neededAdding to the Note — and going shopping with it — is open to everyone in the house, even without Bazar Entry permission. The permission is only checked at the end, when the trip is filed.

Each line carries the name of whoever added it, so "who asked for this?" is answerable. Tap the red minus to strike a line out; it stays visible, struck through, so the removal can be argued with rather than silently happening.

3.3 · Bazar Mode — shop with the list in your hand#

When you are actually setting off, tap Go to bazar with N items. The app asks two things — whose money you are spending and which day this is for — and then the screen turns green.

• 1The green bar with LIVE — everyone else in the house can watch this trip fill in, in real time.
• 2The running total — climbs as you type. No adding up in your head at the till.
• 3"Saved as you type" — every price is written to your phone the moment you leave the box. Close the app, lose the signal, drop the phone; nothing is lost.
• 4Yellow outline = not bought yet. When a line gets a price its outline drops away and it turns white — so at a glance you know what is still on the list.
• 5The minus button — "did not buy". Strikes the line out; it goes back on the Note instead of being filed.

Bought something that was never on the list? Type it into the Item / Price row at the bottom and tap +.

3.4 · Where does this bazar go?#

Tap Finish bazar and the app asks the one question nobody could answer in advance — because the same bag of shopping is either the week's groceries or Friday's biriyani, and you only know which when you get to the till.

Daily bazar list

The month's ordinary shopping. It joins the Bazar list, and it is split across everybody by how many meals they ate — the normal way the cost per meal is worked out.

Special meal bazar

One dated meal, priced from this shopping alone. Pick the day, tick who ate it, and the app shows what each of them pays before anything is filed. This shopping is deliberately kept out of the ordinary cost-per-meal, so one Eid dinner does not make every plain lunch in the month look expensive.

New in 4.0Before this, a special meal had to be created first and priced by hand. Now the shopping and the meal are filed together in one action, and the rate is derived from the receipt.

A last confirmation names exactly what is about to happen — how many items, how much, whose money — and warns you about any line you never gave a price to. Unpriced lines are not filed: a line with no price is not a purchase, and filing it would put a ৳0 row into the month. It stays on the Note instead.

3.5 · Finished the shopping but not allowed to file it#

In a house with a manager, filing bazar is a permission. But the shopping still happened, and the prices are on the shopper's phone and nowhere else.

So the app does not refuse. It hands over: the finished trip, every price intact, goes to the house, and a banner tells whoever can file it that it is waiting. They open it, check it, and file it — or send it back with a note, in which case the shopper keeps everything and can change it and send it again.

3.6 · A whole trip, end to end#

1. Over the week, three different people add Chal, Peyaj, Rui Mach, Dim and six more to the Bazar Note. Nobody's balance moves.
2. Friday, Ziad is going out. He taps Go to bazar with 10 items, picks Manager's money and today's date, and the screen turns green.
3. In the market he types prices as he buys. The total climbs to ৳2,620. Two things were not available — he taps the minus on both, and they go back on the Note for next time.
4. At the till he taps Finish bazar → Daily bazar list → Continue, checks the summary, and taps Upload now.
5. Instantly: eight new rows on the Bazar list dated today, ৳2,620 against the manager's money, the cost per meal recalculated, and all fourteen balances moved. The Note is left holding only what was not bought.

4.1 · How a fixed rate works#

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.

4.2 · Creating one & setting the rate#

4.3 · What changes vs. a calculated house#

4.4 · A worked example — "Green Mess" at ৳45#

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.

Read a rowTake Rahim: 3 meals × ৳45 = ৳135 cost, ৳2000 given to the manager = ৳2000 deposit, so balance = 2000 − 135 = ৳1865 in credit.

Members and money are added exactly as in a calculated house — same Meal grid, same Manager tab.

5.1 · Profile, currency & reminders#

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.

5.2 · Dark mode & themes#

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.

5.3 · Permissions — ask & grant#

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.

The member asks

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 decides

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.

The five permissionsManage Peoples · Meal Entry · Meal Edit · Bazar Entry · Edit Permission. The manager can also set these directly from House → Permissions (§2.10) without waiting for a request.

Why it's handyYou're busy this month and want a trusted housemate to log the bazar. Instead of handing over the whole house, they request Bazar Entry and you grant just that — the rest stays with you.

5.4 · No-manager houses#

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.

5.5 · What's New & About#

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.

5.6 · Working with no internet#

New in 4.0, and the section most worth reading if you are ever somewhere with one bar of signal.

Nothing you save offline is counted, charged or visible to anybody else until you upload it. That is deliberate: a bazar entry sitting on one phone must not move thirteen other people's balances behind their backs.

Each waiting entry says in plain words what it will do when it lands — "Added to the bazar list for 10 August, against Manager. The cost per meal changes for everybody." — so you can decide whether it is still right before you send it.

5.7 · Who's in the house right now#

The Dashboard shows a small ● 3 online count; tap it, or open House → Peoples, for the full list.

Everyone is either Online now or carries a last seen time — "12 hours ago", "5 days ago". It answers exactly one question, and it is a useful one: whether the person you are waiting on has even opened the app yet.

The Activity button at the top right re-sorts the list by who has been most active, rather than alphabetically.

5.8 · Today's menu#

Tap the menu strip on the Dashboard to write what is being cooked. Choose which meals it is for — breakfast, lunch, dinner — and, if your house eats the same thing on the same weekday, tick the days and it repeats.

Whatever is set for the current part of the day shows on everybody's Dashboard, under the meal counts, until that meal's time is over.

Special meal menusNew in 4.0: a special meal can have its own menu, and on a day that has one it replaces the ordinary menu on the Dashboard — because on that day it is the thing people want to know about.

5.9 · Message us#

From Profile → Message us, or Talk to us on the Dashboard's house card. Pick a topic — a bug, a feature request, a question, or just thanks — and write.

Replies arrive in the same thread, with a dot on the Profile tab so you know one is waiting. Links in a reply are tappable.

New in 4.0: this used to be for subscribers only. It is open to everybody now.

A · Log in / log out#

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.

B · Quick FAQ#

C · Glossary#

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.