How settling up over UPI actually works
Scan the QR or copy the UPI ID, pay from your own UPI app, mark it paid. How to make payments to you wait for your approval, why there is no “open UPI app” button, and why NikiPri never touches your money.
9 min readUpdated 7 October 2026
Settling up is the part every splitting app is vague about, so here is exactly what happens. You owe someone ₹450. NikiPri shows you their UPI QR and their UPI ID. You pay them from your own UPI app, the way you pay anyone. Then you mark it paid, and the balance clears — or, if you are the one who was paid and they never got round to it, you mark it received instead.
The money goes directly from your bank to theirs. It never passes through NikiPri, which holds no float, has no wallet, is not a payment gateway, and never sees your UPI PIN, card or bank credentials.
Who pays whom
One rule decides it: whoever paid is owed by everyone who was in the split. Book the nets and your friends owe you; if your friend bought the shuttles, you owe them. Nobody pays into a pot and waits.
When several expenses run in both directions — which is normal in any group that plays weekly — the app nets them down before showing you anything. Five people with a tangle of debts do not need ten payments; the settle-up screen works out the smallest set of transfers that clears everyone.
The four taps
Open settle up
It shows a name and an amount — the net figure between you and that person across everything you share, not one expense at a time.
Scan the QR, or copy their UPI ID
The QR carries the amount and the payee, so scanning it in any UPI app fills the payment in for you. Tapping the UPI ID copies it, which is the most reliable route if you are settling from the same phone.
Pay in your own UPI app
GPay, PhonePe, Paytm, your bank’s app — whatever you already use. This is an ordinary person-to-person UPI payment.
Mark it paid
Back in NikiPri, record it as UPI, cash or other. The balance clears for both of you and it appears in the activity feed, so nobody has to take anyone’s word for it in a chat thread.
Why there is no “open UPI app” button
There used to be one. It was removed after testing on real devices, and it will not be coming back until the underlying rule changes — so it is worth explaining rather than pretending we never had it.
A UPI payment link raised by an app that is not a registered merchant now gets risk-declined by the payment providers. What makes it worse than a plain failure is the error the user sees: the decline surfaces as "You’ve exceeded the bank limit for this payment. Retry with a smaller amount." The limit named in that message has nothing to do with the actual reason, and a ₹10 payment fails in exactly the same way as a ₹10,000 one.
A button that fails and then blames your bank is worse than no button. Scanning the QR and copying the UPI ID both work perfectly, because those are ordinary UPI flows that do not involve one app handing a payment to another. So that is what NikiPri offers.
When there is no UPI ID
If the person you owe has not added a UPI ID, the screen says so and offers the manual route: pay them however you like, then mark it paid. Cash counts. The ledger cares that the debt cleared, not which rails it cleared over.
Adding your own UPI ID is worth doing early — it is the difference between people paying you back in two taps and people meaning to.
When the balance is not in rupees
An expense can be recorded in any currency the app offers, and balances in different currencies are kept apart: if you owe someone ₹874 and they owe you $50, those are two separate debts shown on two lines. Nothing is converted, because a conversion would need a rate, and a rate that is right today is wrong tomorrow. So you settle one currency at a time.
UPI settles rupees only — that is how the rail works, not a limitation of the app. So the QR and the copyable UPI ID appear for ₹ balances. For anything else the screen says so and offers the manual route: send the money however you normally would, then record it here. The ledger cares that the debt cleared, not which rails it cleared over.
Either side can close it
The person who pays can mark it paid — and so can the person who was paid. That second one matters more than it sounds, because the usual way a balance goes stale is not a dispute: someone sends you the money over UPI and simply never opens the app again. Their debt then sits there, clearable only by the one person with no particular reason to bother.
So on the settle-up row, if the money is owed TO you, the button says “Received?”. Tap it, say whether it came by UPI, cash or something else, and the balance clears. The other person gets a notification telling them they are settled, and the team feed says you confirmed it — not that they paid, because they may not have touched the app at all.
This one takes effect immediately, with no confirmation from anybody, and that is deliberate: you are the person the money was owed to, and saying it arrived only ever reduces what you are owed. The one time the app stops you is when the other person has already marked it paid and it is sitting waiting for you — then it asks you to answer that instead, so nobody gets credited twice for the same ₹500.
If you would rather check before it counts
By default, marking a payment as paid clears the balance straight away. That suits people who play together every week and would notice a wrong number immediately. If you would rather see the money in your own account first, turn on “Approve payments to me” in Settings.
With it on, anything someone marks as paid to you arrives as a request instead. You get a notification, the amount sits on your Balances screen labelled as still owed, and nothing about the balance moves until you tap Approve. If it never turned up, tap “Didn’t arrive” — you can add a line saying why, the payer is told, and the debt stands. Nothing is deleted quietly. On Android you can also answer straight from the notification: Confirm asks you to unlock your phone first, because it is money, while Not received works from the lock screen (there is no room there to say why — use the app if you want to).
A request never approves itself. There is no timeout that eventually lets it through, because that would hand anyone who never paid a way to wait it out. It simply waits, and we nudge you after a couple of days. Meanwhile the payer sees it as pending and can withdraw it if they got the amount or the person wrong.
While a request waits, the settle-up row between you two says “Awaiting approval” instead of offering Settle or Received?, so the same payment cannot be marked twice. And however it is recorded, the app will not take a payment bigger than what is still owed — counting anything already waiting for approval. If the balance on someone’s screen is out of date, it tells them how much is actually left rather than recording the difference as credit.
The setting is yours, per person, and it only governs money coming TO you — it never changes how you pay anyone else. You can also override it for one team or group from the shield icon on that group’s Balances screen, which is handy when one crowd is a dozen near-strangers and another is four people you have known for years.
The one payment that works differently
A tournament fee is not an expense split. There, a team owes an external organiser, the team marks it paid, and the organiser confirms receipt — the same shape as the approval step above, except it is always on, because an organiser collecting from twelve teams genuinely does need to confirm each one.
Everything else in the app — the nets, the turf, the shuttles, the dinner afterwards — is the owe-the-payer rule above.
Common questions
Does NikiPri hold my money?
No. It never holds, moves or touches your money. It records who owes whom and shows you the QR and UPI ID to pay directly; the payment happens entirely inside your own UPI app, between your bank and theirs.
Someone paid me but never marked it in the app. Can I clear it myself?
Yes. On the settle-up row for money owed to you, the button says “Received?” — tap it, pick how it reached you, and the balance clears. They are told they are settled. It needs nobody else’s confirmation, because saying money arrived only ever reduces what you are owed.
Do I need to settle each expense separately?
No. Balances net down per person across every group you share, so a month of games between the same friends settles as one payment. The one thing that never nets together is two different currencies — those stay separate and settle separately.
Can I split something in a currency other than rupees?
Yes. Tap the currency symbol next to the amount when you add an expense and pick another one. Balances in different currencies are shown on separate lines and never added together — nothing is converted, because that would need an exchange rate and any rate the app picked would be wrong by the time you settled.
Why is there no QR for my dollar balance?
UPI settles rupees only. For anything else the screen offers the manual route instead: send the money however you normally would, then record it in the app so the balance clears.
What if someone marks a payment as paid but never paid?
Turn on “Approve payments to me” in Settings. After that, anything marked as paid to you arrives as a request: you check your own bank first, and the amount stays owed until you approve it. If it never arrived, tap “Didn’t arrive” — the debt stands and the payer is told. Without the setting, the app records who marked it and when and shows it in the activity feed of both of you (and on the team’s own Activity tab, for team money), because NikiPri cannot see your bank account and does not pretend to verify a payment it can’t.
Can I require approval for some groups but not others?
Yes. The switch in Settings is your default; the shield icon on any team’s or group’s Balances screen overrides it for that one — always ask here, never ask here, or follow your default. Useful when you trust a regular five-a-side crowd but not a large one-off group.
What if the person I paid never gets round to approving it?
It waits. A pending payment never approves itself after a timeout — that would let anyone clear a debt by claiming they paid and sitting out the clock. NikiPri nudges them after two days. Until they answer, the row shows “Awaiting approval”; if you got the amount or the person wrong, withdraw the request and mark it paid again with the right one.
Is there any fee?
No. The app is free and UPI person-to-person payments are free. There is no gateway in the middle to take a cut.