The partner who paid the printer bore the whole cost
On a jointly owned site, one partner paid the printing bill from their own pocket and the monthly settlement never paid it back. The fix, and what it left open.
Two partners own a hoarding between them, say 70 per cent and 30 per cent. A new flex has to be printed, and one of them pays the printer from their own pocket, because that is what happens on the day. At the end of the month the system works out the profit and splits it by percentage, and the partner who paid the printer gets a share of profit like everyone else.
What they do not get is their money back. The printing bill came out of their wallet, and the settlement never heard of it. So the partner who reached for the wallet carries the whole bill, when the agreement said the cost was to be shared in proportion.
The test case used in the log shows the size of it. On a 70/30 split, a 10,000 rupee printing cost should leave the paying partner bearing 7,000. Before the fix they bore all 10,000. These are test figures, not a real settlement, and the log does not claim a real partner lost that amount.
What was actually going on
The record of who paid an expense already existed. The expense form wrote it down every time. The settlement calculation simply never read it: a search of the settlement code for that field found no references at all.
The part that is easy to get wrong is the arithmetic. The expense already reduces net profit, so it already reduces each partner’s share by their percentage. The paying partner’s share is lower by 7,000 and the other partner’s by 3,000. What is missing is only the repayment of the 10,000 that was fronted. Pay that back and the burden lands at 7,000 and 3,000, which is what proportional means.
What we changed
Settlement now carries a second figure beside each partner’s profit share: the expenses that partner fronted. The total due is worked out from the two rather than stored, so it cannot drift away from the parts it came from.
The two were deliberately kept as separate figures. A partner who asks why the number is what it is deserves to see “your profit share, plus what you paid the printer”, not one total to reverse-engineer. Nine tests pin the behaviour. The central one checks that two equal partners end up equally well off, whoever paid.
Three cases would otherwise have gone quietly wrong, and each is handled. An expense with no payer recorded repays nobody, which covers every expense entered before the feature existed, so no old settlement moves. The organisation’s own retained row is never repaid, because money the company paid is not a debt it owes itself. And a partner is repaid even when the project made no profit at all and their share floors at zero.
What it did not fix
The repayment is deliberately not added to the invoice route. A profit share is a service and attracts GST, while repaying a cost somebody fronted is usually a pass-through that does not. Getting that wrong would misstate output tax on a real filing, and it needs the client’s answer, not ours. The log notes that the whole invoice route is due to become a recorded payment anyway, which is where the repayment belongs.
Historical expenses with no payer are not back-filled. They repay nobody, by design, so no earlier settlement changes.
The pattern, for anyone sharing costs with a partner
Check whether the record of who paid is used by the calculation that decides who owes whom. It is common for the form to ask the question, the database to store the answer, and the month-end figure to ignore it.
Then run one example on paper with round numbers: two partners, a 10,000 cost, a 70/30 split, and see whether each ends up bearing their share whoever wrote the cheque.
Where this ends up
Partner settlement is one of the jobs AdBoard does for an operator with jointly owned sites, and this is the system it runs for Gold Sign Media, an outdoor media operator. A partner who fronts a cost now sees it beside their profit share, so the month-end number can be explained line by line.