Start with where you'll be

I watched this one from the corner of a bedroom in March, half-packed. Trip’s set up, everyone’s accepted, and someone sits down to log the deposit they’d already put on the villa. The form won’t take it. Not the amount, not the date, not who paid — it doesn’t know where they were.

Which is the thing to get straight before anything else in here.

A trip in Buddy has no dates. No cities either. Those belong to you, one party at a time, as itinerary legs: a city, a start date, an end date. I’ve been on trips where one person had four legs across two countries and someone else had one. The trip stays vague on purpose and lets everybody say where they’ll actually be.

Putting them in

You → Your itinerary. City, start, end, as many as you need.

The app does ask, in that short setup when you make a trip or accept an invitation. It’s skippable and most people skip it. I’ve never held that against anyone — you’re usually doing it standing up, at a kitchen counter, with a suitcase open. But that’s why so many people meet the problem later, at the worst possible moment, which is the one where money’s involved.

Nobody sees them unless you say so

Private to start with. Sharing is a separate call: keep them to yourself, share the lot, or tick the ones you don’t mind people knowing about. Behind Change, either on your itinerary or on the Home timeline.

If someone hasn’t shared, they don’t just vanish off the trip itinerary. It says they haven’t said where they’ll be, which is at least honest.

What’s waiting on them

Most things with a date on, is the short answer.

An expense gets its city from your legs. If one leg covers that day, it uses it and tells you. If two do, it asks — that’s a travel day, and it isn’t going to guess which end of it you were on. Then it keeps that city on the expense and leaves it there, so editing a leg in November won’t rewrite what you logged in June.

Your budget paces over your own dates, because there aren’t any others to use. “The days” calendar has nothing to draw without legs and says so. And fixing a day — giving a travel day its own number instead of a full day’s allowance — won’t even show you the link until you’ve got a budget and a leg both.

If you’re already halfway through the form

Don’t throw away what you’ve typed. You can add a leg from inside the add-expense flow, on the “What was it?” step, and then carry on.

Nobody’s ever told me where we’re going. I find out when the belt stops and the signs are in a different alphabet. You get to write it down first, which I’d call an advantage.