Split expenses with someone who has no account

Every group has at least one of them: the friend who joined for a single dinner, the parent who is not going to download anything for one week in a rented house, the kid without a phone. You still have to put them in the maths, because leaving them out quietly moves their share onto everyone else.

A placeholder participant is a named person in a shared-expense group who has no account: somebody already in the group adds them by name, and from then on they pay, owe and appear in the settlement list without ever logging in. Most expense apps have some version of this. What almost none of them write down is the part that matters later — what happens to that person's history if they do eventually sign up.

Who actually needs an account

"No signup" is a slogan that hides four different roles. In Dolio they work out like this:

• Group creator — account required. Creating and owning a group means signing in with Google, Apple, or an email and password. This is the one account a group cannot do without.
• Registered member — account required. Anyone who wants to add expenses, check the balance or act as themselves signs in.
• Invitee — account-free to look, account to join. Opening an invite link needs no account. Joining as yourself does.
• Placeholder participant — no account, ever. Added by someone already in the group. A name is the whole requirement: no email, no phone number, no invitation. Dolio calls these ghost participants.

So the honest answer to "does everyone need to sign up?" is no, but somebody does. If you want an app where literally nobody registers, that is a different product category — we compared them in a separate piece on which apps let people take part without an account.

Placeholder or invite link?

The choice is not about how much you like the person. It is about whether they will ever act inside the app.

• Add a placeholder when they will not act — they are not going to enter expenses or check anything, and you are comfortable being their proxy. It takes two seconds and nothing has to be agreed with them.
• Send an invite link when they need to see their own numbers or add their own expenses. Only an account can do either.
• Do both, in that order, when you are not sure. The placeholder keeps today's maths right; the link can follow next week, and claiming stitches the two together.

What a placeholder can and cannot do

The point of a placeholder is that the arithmetic does not treat them as a second-class participant. In Dolio one can:

• Pay for an expense, in full or as one of several payers.
• Carry any kind of share — an equal split, a fixed amount, a weight, or specific lines on an itemised bill.
• Belong to a subgroup, so a couple or a family nets out as one unit.
• Appear in the settlement list, and be settled with once the money actually changes hands.

What they cannot do follows from having no account: they cannot log in, see the group, receive a notification, or be reached by the app at all. There is nowhere to send anything, which is exactly what you asked for when you skipped the email address.

What happens when they finally join

This is the moment that decides whether placeholders were a good idea or a mess, and it is the part almost no documentation covers — ours included, until now.

In Dolio the flow is join first, then claim. Your friend opens the invite link, signs in, and lands in the group as a new member. The app then shows every unclaimed placeholder and asks which one is them — a list of names with a "that's me" next to each, plus "none of these" if they were never in the group's history. Existing members see the same offer as a Claim action next to any placeholder in the participants list.

What the claim does depends on whether that person already has a membership in the group:

• No membership yet: the placeholder is promoted in place. Same row, now attached to their account, and their account name replaces the name you typed. Nothing moves, so nothing can go wrong.
• Already a member: the placeholder is merged into that membership and then deleted. This is the normal path through an invite link, because joining happens before claiming.

The merge is the interesting one, because the two identities can legitimately collide on the same expense — you paid for the taxi, and so did the placeholder version of them. Dolio resolves each collision by adding rather than duplicating:

• Two payer rows on one expense become a single row with the amounts added together.
• Two shares of one expense become a single share, with the weights added when both were weighted.
• Settlements pointing at the placeholder are re-pointed at the real member, and any settlement that would end up going from someone to themselves is removed.
• Item-level assignments on an itemised bill and subgroup memberships merge, without leaving the person assigned twice.
• Comments and uploaded receipts are re-attributed to the account.

The result is that balances do not move. The group's totals before and after a claim are identical, because nothing was created or thrown away — two identities became one.

The same moment in Splitwise

Dolio is our app, so weigh the comparison accordingly — but this is one place where the difference is documented on both sides rather than argued.

Splitwise has the same starting point. Its help centre describes adding "a placeholder friend (someone tracked by name, without contact info)" from the web app, and says "You can always add their email or phone number later to give them access to your group or friendship" (kb.splitwise.com, retrieved 2026-08-15).

The divergence shows up when the two identities end up separate anyway — added with an email and a phone number separately, with two different email addresses, or with a deactivated and an active account. Splitwise documents that outcome as a distinct support case: "When someone is added to a group twice, we recommend they merge their accounts into one." The precondition is the striking part — "The two accounts cannot be included together on any of the same expenses" (kb.splitwise.com, retrieved 2026-08-15). Clearing that means opening every expense the duplicate appears in, editing it, tapping the split line and unchecking the duplicate name — one expense at a time — before the merge is allowed at all.

So the exact case Dolio's claim handles by adding two rows together is the case Splitwise's merge refuses to touch until you have taken the duplicate out of those expenses by hand. On a two-week trip with a shared car and a shared kitchen, that is the difference between one tap and an evening.

One more asymmetry worth knowing before you plan around invite links: Splitwise states plainly that "You cannot join a group on your own – a current member of the group will need to invite you" (kb.splitwise.com, retrieved 2026-08-15).

At the other end of the spectrum sit the apps where nobody registers at all — Tricount, Splid, Kittysplit. There the question never arises, because there is no identity to claim: whoever holds the link or the code is in. Tricount's own terms are explicit that the sharing link "gives read and write access to the Account" (verified 2026-08-12). That is a genuinely different trade, and we laid the options out side by side in which expense apps let people join without an account.

Four rules that catch people out

1. A participant who appears in even one expense can no longer be removed. Not because we are precious about it — deleting them would silently change everyone's balances. From that point the only way a placeholder disappears is by being claimed. If you created one by mistake, delete it before you use it in an expense.
2. Removing a registered member does not erase them. If they have history, their membership turns back into a placeholder with their name intact, so past expenses and balances stay correct — and they can reclaim it if they come back.
3. Leaving a group has a price of entry. You must be settled to zero first. If you have history, you also leave a placeholder of yourself behind, for the same reason: your share of old expenses cannot evaporate.
4. A free group holds up to 50 participants, placeholders included. The cap is per group rather than per person, and it lifts for the whole group as soon as any one member is on Pro. Groups, expenses and split types are unlimited on the free plan either way.

Doing it in Dolio

1. Create the group. This is the one account the group needs — Google, Apple, or email and password.
2. Open the participants list and use Add participant for everyone who will not sign up. Type the name; there is nothing else to fill in.
3. Log expenses normally. Placeholders can be payers, can carry weighted or itemised shares, and can sit in a subgroup.
4. When somebody does want in, copy the group's invite link and send it — or show the QR code if you are all in the same room. They sign in, land in the group, and pick their own name off the list of placeholders.
5. Settle up as usual. The transfer list treats placeholders exactly like members, and you record their payments on their behalf.

If the group you are tracking has one person in it who will never install anything, that is not a reason to fall back to a spreadsheet. Add them by name, keep the maths honest, and leave the door open for the day they change their mind — start a group and add your first participant in about a minute.