Groups within Buxfer are not just a simple collection of friends - they also provide a powerful facility of debt cancellation. For example, they eliminate debt cycles between the members of the group.

However, it turned out that this feature was just a little too advanced for some of our new users. Therefore, we have introduced a way for new users to get started with a simple, non-consolidated group and then convert the group into a consolidated group, if they wish to do so. A non-consolidated group just acts as a way for filtering transactions.

When a group moderator decides to consolidate balances within the group, the following two things happen:

1. You only have a balance with respect to the group as a whole.
2. You no longer have balances with individual group members.

An example might make this clearer. Imagine that within a group Housemates, you had the following balances

• John owes $10 to Sara since she paid for groceries.
• Sara owes $10 to Adam since he paid for the movie.
• Adam owes $10 to John since John paid for beer.

If this group were not consolidated, John would see that he owes $10 to Sara, and gets $10 from John. Similarly, for the other group members. However, notice that if you considered the group as a whole, nobody owes anybody any money at ALL! All their debts cancel off! This is what would happen if this group was converted into a consolidated group.

Hope our new users will find this concept (which is slightly complex, but much useful) a little bit easier to come to grips with.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, July 18th, 2007 at 2:46 pm and is filed under Groups. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.