Households already run an informal ledger. It lives in someone's head, it is disputed on Saturdays, and the child always remembers a different number.
The family ledger is that, written down. One row per money event, each signed, so a person's balance is the sum of their rows.
The ledger
Every row records what happened, how much, in which currency, who entered it, and what caused it: a chore that was approved, an allowance that ran, money moved into a savings goal, cash actually handed over.
Rows cannot be edited. A correction is a new row in the opposite direction, with a reason on it. That is the whole reason the ledger is worth keeping: a record anyone can quietly rewrite settles no arguments.
Balances are never summed across currencies. If a household holds money in two, the statement shows two balances rather than inventing a conversion nobody agreed to.
What Margin does not do with money
Margin holds no money and moves none. There are no payment rails here, and there is no card.
"Mark as paid" records that cash changed hands in the real world. It writes the payout into the ledger so the balance is right. The actual handing over is still you, in a kitchen, with a note or a bank transfer.
Allowances
One allowance per child, per workspace. Weekly, fortnightly or monthly, with a payday you pick.
Allowances are unconditional. Nothing ties a payout to whether the chores got done, because tying the two together turns every Saturday into a negotiation, and households that want that behaviour already have chore rewards for it.
Turn on automatic payout and it runs itself, once a day, without anyone opening the app. Leave it off and nothing happens on payday until someone taps Mark as paid.
Two details worth knowing:
- Missed paydays are paid, not skipped. Come back after three weeks away and three allowances land, each dated to the payday it belonged to. Past eight missed periods it stops and asks for a manual adjustment instead, because at that point somebody should look at it.
- Paydays anchor to the schedule, not to when you tapped. Marking Saturday's allowance paid on Monday does not move payday to Mondays.
Pausing an allowance stops payouts and keeps the schedule. Deleting one leaves every payout it already made in the statement.
Savings goals
A goal has a name, an emoji, and a target. Anyone in the household can make one for themselves, including a child, and a child stays in charge of their own. Someone else's is read-only.
Contributing moves money that already exists in that person's balance. It cannot mint any, and a contribution larger than the balance is refused rather than allowed to go negative. Saved money leaves the spendable balance and sits against the goal, which is the point of a goal.
When the total reaches the target the goal is marked achieved and the family feed says so. Nothing is automatically paid out; a reached goal is a fact, and what happens next is a conversation.
Deleting a funded goal refunds what was parked, as a new entry. The contributions that got it there stay in the record.
Points, houses and the House Cup
Points are a score. They are never money, they cannot be spent or redeemed, and there is no conversion between the two. A chore is worth either money or points, never both.
Points accumulate into seven levels: Apprentice, Helper, Star, Champion, Legend, Wizard and Grandmaster, at 0, 50, 150, 350, 700, 1,200 and 2,000. Points can be deducted as well as awarded, and a deduction stops at zero rather than pushing a child into debt for a score.
Houses are teams. Four come ready to use, Phoenix, Dragon, Griffin and Serpent, and you can rename them, re-emoji them, or build your own. Members are assigned by hand, one at a time, and a member can belong to no house at all. Every award and deduction moves the person's total and their house's together.
A season is the House Cup: a start, an end, and either a date or a points threshold as the finish line. When the finish line arrives the app says the season is ready to finish, and a grown-up presses the button. Nothing ends on its own, deliberately, because every open tab in the house would otherwise race to write the winner.
Finishing a season stores the final standings as a snapshot and names the winning house. If the leading house has no points, no winner is recorded, because "nobody won" is an honest outcome. Cancelling a season closes it with no standings and no winner at all.
One gap, stated plainly
Recording a one-off bonus, an unstructured adjustment, or a cash payout that did not come from an allowance is reachable through the assistant today, and there is no button for it in the app yet. The statement will show those entries correctly when they exist; it just cannot be the thing that creates them.
Availability
All of this is the family suite, which means a Family plan and a family workspace. See Plans and limits and Family workspaces.