Raj and Friends' Birding Trips

Raj records who paid for the diesel, the lunch and the rest house, sees who owes whom, and can undo any entry he gets wrong.

Who this is for

Raj Deshmukh is fifty-four, works at a bank in Nagpur, and has been going birding with the same six friends for eleven years. Four trips a year, mostly Tadoba and Pench, sometimes Melghat. He is the one who keeps the list of what they saw, so he has quietly become the one who keeps the money too. The moment is Sunday evening, back home, boots still muddy, five UPI screenshots on his phone and no idea who is owed what.

How the job is done today

There is a WhatsApp group called Feathered Friends. Somebody forwards a UPI screenshot for 3,200 diesel. Somebody else says he paid the dhaba but does not remember the amount. Raj scrolls up through four hundred bird photos looking for a payment message from Saturday morning. He keeps a small diary in the car glovebox but writes in it only when he remembers. Twice the group has simply given up and said let it go, which means Sameer quietly paid more than his share both times and never said anything.

The screens, in order

1. Our trips — Shows every trip they have taken, newest first, so Raj can open the one he is thinking about.
2. The trip — Holds one outing in one place, who came, what they saw, and every rupee spent on it.
3. Add a payment — Lets Raj write down that one person paid a certain amount for a certain thing on this trip.
4. Who owes whom — States in plain sentences that Sameer owes Raj 1,400 and Raj owes Farhan 600, with nothing else on the screen.
5. What I changed — Lists everything Raj has added, corrected or removed, with an undo sitting next to each one.

What it keeps track of

• Trips — where we went, which dates, who came along, what we saw
• Friends — name, phone number, UPI name people know them by
• Payments — who paid, how much, what it was for, which trip, split between whom
• Settlements — who paid whom, how much, which day, which trip it clears
• What I changed — what Raj did, to which entry, when, and whether it has since been undone

The one decision that matters

Undo can mean one of two things. Either a button that reverses the last thing Raj did, which vanishes the moment he taps something else, or a permanent record where every entry ever made stays reversible, even one from three months ago. Build the second. Raj is not afraid of the mistake he notices immediately. He is afraid of the one Farhan spots in November while scrolling through the Melghat trip. So nothing is ever edited over the top of something else and nothing is truly deleted. A correction is a new line saying what changed, the old figure still visible underneath, and an undo beside it that works forever. The screen that makes Raj trust the whole thing is not the balances. It is the list of everything he has touched.

What to leave out of the first version

Leave out collecting money inside the site. No payment links, no gateway, no reminders sent out. They already pay each other on UPI in four seconds and they see each other every month anyway. Putting real money through software is the exact thing Raj is nervous about, and one wrong transfer would end his trust in the whole thing on day one. The site tells him the number. His thumb does the rest. Also leave out unequal shares and percentages for now. Everything splits evenly among whoever came, because that is what they have always done.

How you would know it worked

On the drive back from Pench, nobody opens the WhatsApp group to ask who paid for the rest house. Raj reads out three numbers at the tea stall and everyone has settled before the cups come back. And the first time Farhan says an amount looks wrong, Raj fixes it in twenty seconds instead of scrolling for a week.

Build it

Paste this in and let it run.

I go birding with the same six or seven friends, mostly Tadoba and Pench, and on every trip one of us pays for the diesel, one pays for lunch at the dhaba, one books the forest rest house. I want a small website only for our group where I add a trip, tick who came, note what we saw, and then enter each payment as who paid, how much and what for. It should then tell me plainly that Sameer owes me 1,400 and I owe Farhan 600, and let me mark it settled once the money comes on UPI. The main thing is that I am slow with these things and I will type a wrong amount. Every single entry must have an undo next to it, even one from last month, and I want a page showing everything I have changed so I can see for myself that nothing has quietly gone missing.