Revel Tally

Create an account with your email and a password, then you land on your home screen — mission control for everything you're planning.

Three tabs at the top

• My Events — events you own and organize.
• Invited — events someone shared with you to view.
• Split — everywhere you owe or are owed, across all events.

The budget banner

The dark band totals every active event, grouped by currency: Total Budget, Total Spent, To Vendor (what's actually been paid out), and Remaining — with a line showing how much you've collected from splitters.

Tip: Tap the ＋ to create an event, the 🎟️ to redeem an invite, and the 🚪 for your profile & sign-out.

Home — My Events, the budget banner & your event cards

The event tabs

Budgets & templates

A brand-new event's Expenses tab offers “✨ Start from a Wedding template” — or a Group Trip one, or whichever type you picked. You get a checklist of the line items that kind of event usually needs, each with a sensible starting amount you can edit. Untick anything that does not apply.

Pick the line items to add — untick anything you don't need

…and your Expenses tab fills in instantly

The Overview tab is the budget at a glance: planned against actual, what has gone to vendors against what you have collected, the per-person split, a category breakdown, and any linked events.

Overview — a wedding's budget at a glance

The same tabs on a group trip — travel categories instead

Included expenses — bundling a package

A venue price that already covers the DJ, the linens and the cake should not count them twice. Open the parent expense, choose Includes other expenses, and tick the line items it covers. They nest underneath it and drop out of every rollup.

Tick what the package already covers

Keep the itemised detail if you have it

The venue, with what it includes nested under it

Splitting the cost

Every splitting attendee is pre-selected on a new expense; add or remove people per expense. When the shares are not equal, switch from Split equally to Custom split and set each person's share in $ or % — they have to add up to the total, and the app tells you if they do not. Change it later with ✏️ Edit split on the expense.

Custom split — set each person's share in $ or %

…and change it later from the expense

Your own share, on any event, is on the Split tab.

Split — what you owe, and what it is for

An expense — its split, what it includes, and vendor payment

Settling up

View Full Breakdown → Settle Up works out the fewest transfers that square everyone, rather than each person paying each other person. Partial payments are fine; a balance can be cleared in pieces. The Payments tab keeps the history for the event, and the home screen keeps it across all of them.

Settle Up — the shortest set of transfers

Payments — what has actually moved

Getting paid back

Hand off to an app they already use. Add your payment methods once — Profile → Payment methods takes a Venmo handle, Cash App cashtag and/or PayPal.Me name. Anyone who owes you then sees Pay with Venmo / Cash App / PayPal on their own transfer, opening that app with the exact amount and a note pre-filled. Those buttons only ever appear on a person's own debt. Afterwards they tap Tell [name] I've paid and you confirm it arrived.

Profile — add your handles once

…and they appear on whoever owes you

Or take payment inside the app, and let it close itself. Set it up once at Profile → Get paid in the app → Set up payments, a secure Stripe page confirming who you are and where the money lands. After that, anyone settling with you sees Pay with Apple Pay or Credit Card (Google Pay on Android). They pay, it goes to your bank, and the transfer clears itself — no nudging, no “did you send it yet?”.

Set it up once — Stripe handles the rest

…and everyone settling up with you gets a Pay button

People & the guest list

People — roles, party sizes and who is splitting

Expenses in depth

• Payment schedules — split a bill into a deposit + installments, each with its own due date and paid toggle (this drives the “to vendor” number).
• Included expenses — bundle line items under a parent so a package price never double-counts.
• Who's splitting — every splitting attendee is pre-selected; add or remove people per expense.
• Custom splits — switch an expense from Split equally to Custom split and set each person's share in $ or % (they must add up to the total). Adjust any time via ✏️ Edit split on the expense.
• Payment reminders — get nudged before a due date (in-app and push).
• Photos & vendor links — attach receipts and a website to any expense.

Import an existing budget from a spreadsheet

Already planned this in a spreadsheet? On the Expenses tab, tap ↑ Import from spreadsheet instead of starting over. Upload a .xlsx, .xls, or .csv file and Revel Tally brings in every line item — matching common column names (Item, Amount, Category, Vendor, Notes, Due Date, Paid) and even guessing the category from the vendor type (a "DJ" or "Photographer" line lands in the right bucket automatically). Imported expenses split evenly among whoever's currently marked as splitting, just like adding one by hand — adjust who's in or the split afterward on any expense.

Bring in your existing budget instead of starting from scratch

Scan a receipt to auto-fill

Adding an expense from a paper (or emailed) receipt? Tap 📸 Scan a receipt to auto-fill at the top of Add Expense — take a photo or pick one from your library, and Revel Tally reads it and fills in the amount, a name, the vendor, the date, and a best-guess category for you. Everything stays editable, so glance it over and tweak anything before you save. It handles regular phone photos and screenshots alike.

Add Expense — tap Scan a receipt and the details fill themselves in

Photos on expenses

Every expense has a 📷 Photos card — attach receipts, contracts, or inspiration shots with ＋ Add. Photos are stored securely in the cloud, so they're visible to everyone in the event (not just the phone that added them) and survive reinstalls. Tap to preview; long-press or ✕ to remove — removed photos are deleted from storage too.

Your profile picture

Give your account a face: on Profile, tap the avatar (or its little 📷 badge) to pick a photo. It's cropped to a neat square automatically; tap again to choose a new photo or remove it.

Venue expense — photos everyone in the event can see

Profile — tap the avatar to set your picture

Comments on expenses

Every expense has a 💬 Comments thread so you can hash out the details right where the money lives — "shuttle or carpool?", "deposit's due Friday, can someone confirm?" Both the organizer and invited viewers can post, so it doubles as a lightweight activity feed for co-planners.

• Everyone in the loop — when someone comments, the event owner and anyone who's already replied get a push notification, so conversations don't get missed.
• Your own words, your call — long-press a comment you wrote to delete it (the event owner can remove any comment).
• Stays tidy — once a thread grows past a few comments it collapses to the latest three, with View earlier comments to expand and Show less to fold it back up.

Transportation expense — co-planners talking it through in the thread

People & attendees

• Quick add a person with a name and role; duplicate contacts are flagged so you don't add someone twice.
• Import from a spreadsheet for big guest lists — same idea as importing expenses: upload a .xlsx, .xls, or .csv with Name and Email/Phone columns (Role, Address, City, State, and Zip are optional) and everyone's added at once.
• Mark anyone as not splitting (e.g. a vendor or a child) and they're left out of cost math.
• Splitting isn't the same as attending. Someone can share costs without being there — a parent chipping in for the wedding, or a guest who cancels after the deposit is already paid and still owes their share. Revel Tally never changes who's splitting based on who turns up; that call stays with the organizer.
• Someone dropping out later? Take them off the expenses they were on, and once their last share is gone they move to Not Splitting on their own. You can also do it directly: open the People tab and turn Splitting off for them. Either way they stop appearing in the split summary and stop being included when you add a new expense.

People tab — Import brings in a whole guest list at once

Headcount — what you owe the venue, before the invoice

Wedding venues price on a guaranteed minimum: 100 guests at $85 a head, payable whether or not 100 come, with every head beyond that billed on top. Today the app stores the total and knows nothing about the 100 or the $85 — so the largest financial risk in the budget is invisible until the invoice lands.

A Headcount tab appears beside People on the events that have a guest list and a venue — a wedding, shower, party or corporate event. A group trip does not get one: everyone going is already on the list and there is no minimum to miss. You can turn it on or off on any event.

What it shows. Your venue's minimum and maximum against the number of people on your list, and how far under or over you are. Under the minimum is the one worth catching early — 62 against a guaranteed 100 means paying for 38 empty seats, and that is only fixable while there is still time to renegotiate.

One row is often more than one person. An invitation goes to “Sarah and guest”, or to a family of four. On the People tab each person carries a party size — how many the invitation covers, including them — and how many of those are children. That is what the venue counts, so a list of 40 invitations can be 90 heads. You can add the other names when you know them, or leave it at “and guest” and fill them in later, and you can say how the invitation should be addressed — “Mr & Mrs John Smith”, or “& Family” once children are coming.

Not everyone gets an invitation. You are hosting, so no envelope is addressed to you — and the same goes for the couple and any vendor. Each person has an on the invite list switch, set sensibly by role to begin with and changeable on anyone: a plus-one already covered by their partner's card comes off it too. Taking someone off does not remove them from the headcount. They still eat, and the venue still counts them.

Children are asked about, not assumed. You tell the app whether children are invited, roughly how many, what the venue charges for them, and — the one that matters — whether the venue counts them toward the minimum. Vendors genuinely differ, and it is a term in your contract, so guessing would put a wrong number on the biggest line in your budget. With 110 on the list and 20 children the venue excludes, only 90 count toward a minimum of 100: you are under by 10, not over.

And what it costs. Tap What the heads cost for the breakdown — it sits one tap away rather than on the tab, the way payment history does, because it is there to read rather than act on. Adults and children are priced separately at their own rates and totalled, so “$40 a child” is money on the screen rather than a setting you entered once. It is an estimate from today's list, never a booked cost — your venue's invoice is what counts.

Headcount — the venue's limits, and who it counts

One tap away — adults and children at their own rates

RSVP — letting guests reply themselves

You can record replies by hand, but you do not have to. Turn on Let guests reply themselves on the Headcount tab and the event gets a guest page: a plain web page, no app and no account, where the people you invited say whether they are coming.

Headcount — the guest link, its QR, and the ways out to a printer

Getting the code onto paper

Most of this ends up at a stationer or a print shop, so the exports are built for that rather than for your phone's photo roll.

The mail-merge file works whether or not you are using per-guest codes. Each row says which kind of link it carries — Personal or Shared — so a list caught mid-switch never prints the wrong square on somebody's invitation.

What a guest sees. Who the invitation covers, a yes or no, and then only what applies to them — the seats on their invitation, a box to name an “and guest”, a tick for children, and a dinner choice if you have set a menu. They can come back to the same link and change their answer.

What a guest opens — a web page, no app and no account

One reply: who is coming, what they eat, and which parts they can make

A seat that is coming has to say who. “And guest” is a real state and stays one, but it lives in a seat nobody has answered for yet — not in one claimed as attending. A confirmed head you cannot put on a place card or a dietary list ends the conversation without answering it.

Where a reply came from. Each one is marked as the guest's own or as something you recorded, so a reply you took over the phone is never mistaken for one they gave. You can override any answer, and the app keeps that it was overridden.

Turning it off. Replace the link if it gets somewhere it should not be — the old one stops working immediately — or turn it off entirely. Per-guest codes can be regenerated the same way.

Parts of the day — a wedding is not one room

Children come to the ceremony and go home before the reception. Forty people are at the dinner and ninety at the party after it. Add parts — ceremony, reception, after-party — each with its own name, time, and guest list.

Everyone is invited to everything until you say otherwise. An event with no parts behaves exactly as it always did, and a seat you have not narrowed is on every part's list. Narrowing is the exception you record, and it is per seat, because “the children are only at the ceremony” happens inside a single invitation.

The guest still replies once. They say yes, and mark the exceptions — not three separate RSVPs. A guest can never widen their own invitation; a carve-out only ever narrows, so the list stays yours.

The Headcount tab then breaks the replies down per part. They deliberately do not add up to the total, and the app says so rather than leaving you to work out why the reception is smaller than the ceremony.

Replies first — then the same count, per part of the day

The parts themselves — each with its time and its own list

Meal choices & what to tell the caterer

Add a menu and guests choose their dinner as part of replying. Options belong to a part of the day, so a ceremony with no food simply has no options, and the reception and the after-party can have entirely different menus.

Two kinds of menu, and the difference matters:

• Guests pick one — a plated dinner. Each guest takes exactly one and the kitchen needs a count per dish.
• Served to everyone — snacks, a buffet, a doughnut wall. Nobody chooses; the only number worth having is how many people will be there. Asking a guest to pick a snack invents a decision they do not have.

The menu, grouped by part — and a ceremony that simply has none

Children's options sit on their own menu, because catering contracts price them apart, and they can only be chosen for a seat marked as a child.

What to tell the caterer appears on the Headcount tab once a menu exists: a count per dish for the menus that are picked from, and a head count for the ones that are served. Guests with no choice yet are shown as still to choose rather than folded into a dish nobody picked.

What to tell the caterer — per dish, per part, children counted apart

Guaranteed minimums & the overage forecast

The venue's minimum lives on the Headcount tab. A contract's minimum lives on the expense it belongs to. Open any expense and you can record the heads the price covers, the cost per extra head, whether children count toward it, and which part of the day it is measured against — so a reception caterer counts the people at the reception rather than the whole guest list.

The expense then carries a forecast beside the amount. While replies are open it is a range, because a single number would be wrong by most of the room:

• how many are confirmed, and how many the price already covers;
• what the final headcount could be, depending on who still replies;
• and what that might cost on top — or how many seats you are paying for and not filling.

It never changes the amount you owe. It sits beside it as a forecast, and you edit the real figure when the vendor confirms the bill.

The contract's terms — heads covered, rate, part of the day, children

…and the forecast they produce, as a range while replies are open

Adults-only events

If children are not invited, say so once on the event and the app stops asking about them everywhere else — no child tick on the guest page, no children's menu, no child rate. If your list already has children on it, it tells you how many are affected before you switch, rather than quietly resetting them.