Splitting with friends who don’t have the app
Nobody wants to install an app to pay you ₹200. Add them by name and phone number, split as normal, and let them claim their history if they ever join.
5 min readUpdated 6 October 2026
The moment a splitting app asks everyone to sign up before it will do anything, it has lost. Your Thursday group is nine people, four of whom will never install anything, and one of whom is your uncle. You still need to know what they owe.
So an expense in NikiPri does not require the other person to have an account. You add them with a name and a phone number, and they hold shares and balances exactly like anyone else.
Two ways in, depending on where you are
In a game: add them as a guest player
A team admin adds someone by name and phone, and from that moment they are a full player: on the roster, on the attendance list, and in the split. This is the person who turns up with a bat and no intention of downloading anything.
In Split: just type their name
Adding an expense, one field takes a name, an @username or a phone number. As you type it tells you whether that person is already on NikiPri — a match resolves to their real account, and anyone else becomes a placeholder when you save. You can also pull one contact in from your phone’s own contact picker; the app never reads your address book, only the single contact you tap.
What a person without an account can and cannot do
| Can | Cannot |
|---|---|
| Be on the roster and the attendance list | Log in — the record has no password and never gets one |
| Owe a share of any expense | Be the payer of an expense |
| Have their cash payment recorded by an admin | Receive a settlement to a UPI ID they have not got |
| Carry dues and a running balance | Be a team admin, or be found in search |
They get no notifications either, which is the point: they have not agreed to anything. The record exists so the person who paid the ground is not carrying their share, not so the app can message a stranger.
Clearing what they owe
They hand over ₹200 in cash at the next game, and a team admin records it against them. Without that, a guest’s balance could never reach zero and the ledger would drift from reality. Whoever records it is stored alongside the payment, so there is always a name attached to "he says he paid".
If they do install it later
They give the same phone number when they sign up
The signup form asks for a mobile number, and that number is what links the two. It is normalised to a single standard form everywhere it is written, so +91 98765 43210 and 9876543210 are the same person rather than two. The form picks your country’s dialling code from your phone’s region and time-zone settings, and you can change it — what matters is that it is the same full number your friend saved. Giving it is optional — but giving it there is what makes everything below happen by itself.
Given at signup, the record simply becomes their account
There is no request and nothing for anyone to approve: a brand-new account holds nothing of its own, so the record they are joining can just be handed to them whole. They land on their games and their balances the first time they open the app. Whoever added them is told it happened, which is the check that replaces the approval — a number that reached the wrong person can be flagged.
Added later, a human approves it instead
Someone who signed up without a number and put it on their profile afterwards raises a request. For a guest player, any admin of that team answers it; for someone added in Split, the person who typed the number in. There is no SMS OTP, so once an account exists somebody who knows the person has to say yes.
The person deciding is told about it
The request is pushed to whoever can answer it and waits in their Activity tab under "Waiting for you", with the name, the masked number and what would transfer. They do not have to go looking for it, and the person who asked is told either way.
Their history is already theirs
Nothing is migrated, because the record they claim is the one that has held their attendance and their balances all along. They sign in with their own credentials and land on it.
Common questions
Will they get a text message from NikiPri?
No. Someone added by phone number receives no notifications of any kind. The number is used as an identity key so they can claim the record later, not as a contact channel.
Can they pay me back if they are not on the app?
Of course — cash, UPI, whatever you already do. Someone with access to the team records it in the app so the balance clears, with their name attached to the confirmation.
Can a guest player pay for something?
Not as the recorded payer. Settling is "everyone owes whoever paid", settled to that person’s UPI, and a record with no account has no UPI ID to settle to. If they genuinely paid the ground, the cleanest fix is to invite them properly.
I added the same friend twice by mistake. What now?
A phone number that already belongs to an account always resolves to that account rather than making a second copy, so the usual cause of duplicates is prevented. If two records did get created with different numbers, ask us — that is a support job, not a self-serve one, because it is somebody’s money history.