How to split the cost of a cricket nets session with friends

A nets session is the most ordinary money problem in Indian cricket, and the hardest one to settle. There is no opponent and no tournament — just eight of you in a WhatsApp group, a ground that wants ₹1,200 an hour, one person who pays the whole thing on their card, and a week of "I will send it, bhai".

The awkward part is never the arithmetic. It is that by Thursday nobody agrees on who was actually there. Two people said yes and did not come. One person turned up who never replied. The person who paid is left doing the accounting AND the chasing, which is why they quietly stop volunteering to pay.

NikiPri handles this by keeping three separate facts apart: who was invited, who said they were coming, and who actually played. Only the last one decides the money.

Set the group up once

Make a team for the crew — "Sunday Nets", say — and pick cricket as the sport. Do not overthink the word "team": there is no opponent anywhere in this flow, and nothing asks you to enter one. The team is just the container that holds your regulars, your sessions and your money, so you never rebuild the list of people again.

Invite them by username or share the invite link in the same WhatsApp group you already use. Nobody is ever added silently — an invite sits pending until the person accepts, which is a deliberate rule and not an oversight.

The five steps, start to settled

1. 1

   Create the session

   Tap "Net session" at the top of the form — that swaps the match questions for nets ones, and the box asks for a title instead of an opponent. Give it a name you would use out loud — "Nets, Thursday 7pm". Add the ground (pick it from the shared directory or type the venue), the start time, and the nets details: how many nets are booked, for how long, ball type, pitch, and whether there is a bowling machine.

2. 2

   Set the minimum you need

   Fill in "players needed". If nets only make sense with six, put six. The session card then shows everyone how many are still needed, which is a far better nudge than repeating "guys, we need 2 more" in the group chat.

3. 3

   Let everyone RSVP

   Each person taps IN, OUT or MAYBE, and the count updates live — on Android they can answer right from the “new match” or reminder notification without opening the app. Nobody has to scroll a chat thread to work out where the numbers stand — which is normally where the plan dies. Share the session’s link into the group and anyone can tap it to see the time, the ground and how many are in, whether or not they have the app. When a few still have not answered, the session screen offers to remind exactly those people — not the whole team, and not the ones who already said no. If someone who said IN or MAYBE changes to OUT, the admins and everyone still IN get a notification, and every answer on the session screen shows when it was given.

4. 4

   Mark who actually played

   After the session, a team admin taps "Mark who played". It opens with everyone who said IN already ticked, so the whole job is unticking the two who did not show, and ticking the friend who turned up unannounced.

5. 5

   Add the ground fee and let it split

   Add the expense on the session itself, category "turf", and the people it splits between default to exactly the ones you just marked as played. Whoever paid the ground is recorded as the payer, so everyone else now owes them their share. The amount field has a currency next to it — it starts at your group’s or team’s currency, or your own default, and you can tap it to change it for this one expense.

Six people, ₹1,200: everyone sees ₹200 against their name and the person who paid sees ₹1,000 owed to them. The split is exact to the paisa — an amount that will not divide evenly has its leftover distributed rather than quietly rounded away, so the parts always add back up to the total.

The bits that usually go wrong

Two people paid

One booked the nets, the other bought the balls. Add both as payers on the same expense with the amount each of them put in. The split then works out who owes what to whom, and the settle-up screen collapses the whole thing into the fewest possible transfers rather than making six people pay two people separately.

Someone was there but should not pay

A friend came to watch, or a batsman only faced ten balls. Untick them in the split and they stay on the session without owing anything. Being part of the session and being part of the bill are two different questions, and the app asks them separately.

You got the attendance wrong

Fix who played and an equal split recalculates itself. There are two cases where it deliberately will not: a custom split you typed by hand, and an expense somebody has already paid against. Both would mean rewriting a number a person has already acted on, so those are left alone and reported back to you instead of silently changing.

Getting the money back

Everyone owes the person who paid, and settles to that person’s UPI. NikiPri is not a payment gateway and never touches the money: it shows the payer’s UPI QR to scan and their UPI ID to copy, the payment happens in your own UPI app, and then somebody marks it paid — as UPI, cash, or something else.

How settling up actually works

Reminders do the chasing after that, so the person who fronted ₹1,200 is not also the person sending "bhai?" nine times.

What it does not do yet

• It will not cancel the session by itself when the minimum is not met by a cutoff time. The count is there to prompt a human, not to make the call.
• There is no per-head estimate before people RSVP — the cost appears once the expense is added, not while everyone is still deciding.
• There is no waitlist when more people say IN than you need.

These are honest gaps rather than hidden ones. If they are the difference between the app working for your crew and not, tell us — feature requests from inside the app get read.