The ship's kitty on a sailing trip
Before the first trip with a new crew, the question comes up at some point of how the shared costs for diesel, harbour and provisions get paid. For a long time the answer was an envelope of cash into which everyone puts the same amount at the start, and that was also the simplest solution. Today the pure cash kitty is usually the most laborious one, because part of the expenses inevitably bypasses it and makes the settlement at the end so tedious, for instance when the marina only takes cards or someone buys something spontaneously ashore without going to the envelope first.
In short:
- The pure cash kitty only works as long as every expense goes through the envelope, which with card payments and spontaneous purchases usually no longer happens.
- Cost-splitting apps take the arithmetic off your hands, but rely on everyone making their settlement payment at the end, which is not certain in a new crew.
- A deposit at the start provides security while the crew does not yet know each other, and digital bookkeeping along the way catches everything that is not paid from the envelope.
- Whoever uses an app does best to let everyone enter their own expenses, because then nobody has to chase receipts and messages.
How does the ship's kitty work on a sailing trip?
The ship's kitty is the crew's shared money for everything the trip costs as a whole. What is paid from it and what everyone covers themselves, say the dinner at the restaurant or the excursion ashore, is best settled before the trip, together with the other documents of the trip planning.
The classic ship's kitty with cash
At the start of the trip everyone pays the same amount into an envelope or a tin, and one crew member takes on the kitty as treasurer. The treasurer keeps a cash book on paper, store the receipts in the envelope and hand out money when someone shops for the crew. Anyone who went off without cash from the kitty brings back the receipt and gets the amount refunded.
That works well as long as every single expense really goes through the envelope. In practice, individual receipts usually get lost, and at the end the cash and the cash book do not match, because nobody remembers who paid for the diesel at the fuel stop and whether the money for it was already taken out of the kitty.
Why cash alone is no longer enough
More and more often you cannot pay in cash at all along the way. The marina office takes cards, berths are booked online in advance, and for electricity and water on the pontoon there is a machine that only accepts cards. On top of that comes the spontaneous purchase ashore, where nobody goes to the envelope on board first.
How this starts often shows on the very first morning in harbour. Two early risers from the crew fetch bread rolls at the town quay while the rest are still asleep. The envelope stays on board because the treasurer is still in their bunk, and the bakery only takes cards anyway.
So the bread rolls are paid for privately, and from then on two sets of books run side by side, the cash kitty in the envelope and a growing pile of private outlays that are only noted in someone's head or in the group chat. On the last evening the cash book, the chat and the bank statements then have to be put together.
Cost-splitting apps take the arithmetic off your hands
Apps for splitting expenses solve the problem of the double bookkeeping because there is no envelope anymore. Everyone pays whatever way suits at the moment, enters the expense with the amount and the people involved, and the app keeps the balances. At the end it proposes the settlement payments from person to person, so nobody has to do the sums.
Among friends who know each other and will see each other again after the trip, this is usually the simplest solution. It does rely on trust, though, because whoever paid for a lot along the way ends up with a large credit and has to collect the money from the others after the trip. In a crew that only met on board, say through a crew-finding platform, as a working passage or as friends of friends, the risk stays with the person who paid.
Deposit plus digital bookkeeping
For a crew that does not yet trust each other, the combination of both is the way to go. At the start everyone pays a deposit into the kitty, in cash to the treasurer. Along the way every expense is recorded digitally, whether it was paid from the kitty or put on someone's card, and an outlay is then refunded from the kitty or offset against the deposit.
The usual cost-splitting apps, however, have no concept of a shared kitty and only split each amount between people. This model needs bookkeeping that covers both, the kitty as a pool of its own with deposits and expenses and, alongside it, the outlays and payments of the individual people, so that the two can be offset against each other.
Tip: the treasurer is not a gatekeeper
The treasurer does not need to release every entry or enter it themselves. It is simpler when everyone in the crew enters their own expenses as they arise, because then nobody has to collect receipts and messages. What remains for them is to check the entries for completeness and to clear up discrepancies within the crew.