When you first run DivisiBill after installation, it will start by showing you this "Welcome" text. After you exit from the help system, DivisiBill will show the startup screen (illustrated below) which will check for the optional Professional Edition Subscription.
If this is your first time using DivisiBill WATCH THE QUICK DEMO here (scroll down to see the whole image). The general model is you start from an old bill and edit it to describe a new one. DivisiBill will save changed bills automatically. After the startup screen (see below) new users are taken to the tutorial screen (there's a picture of it below too) which makes it a bit easier to figure out the steps you need to take to enter a bill.
If you have already purchased a Professional Edition subscription, DivisiBill will show a "Cloud Access" pop-up to ask whether you want to enable cloud storage. Cloud storage is disabled by default, but if you already have DivisiBill data stored in the cloud, enabling it at this point will permit DivisiBill to reload your most recent lists of venues and people automatically. You can also enable cloud storage later. Once cloud storage is enabled, individual bills can be used or copied from the cloud, and bills, stored lists of people or venues are saved automatically when they change and can be downloaded and either merged with, or replace current items.
Next, DivisiBill will show a pop-up asking for permission to access to your location in order to determine if you're at a venue you previously stored. The app will work without this permission, but it will be unable to look for existing bills for your current location.
After the permission dialogs, you will see the whole startup screen, which looks like this:
The Progress indicator will spin and the Status information will be updated as initialization proceeds (you can tap on the icon to pause initialization, tap again to resume it). Once initialization has been completed (typically in a few seconds) the next page you see may be the tutorial page which guides you through a few basic steps:
As you gain experience you can elect not to use the tutorial page and just go directly to the Items page, which will contain a bill. If no existing bill is suitable, DivisiBill loads up a sample one for "Queasy Diner" with a half dozen typical items you might find on a restaurant bill. These items include an appetizer that's shared equally, meals for each participant, wine shared unequally, and finally a discount shared equally.
You can get an idea how each item is shared by looking at the different symbols in the left column for each class of sharing, but to understand or change the details of how an item is shared you must select the item by tapping on it. Once an item is selected, detailed information for that item will be shown at the bottom of the page, where it can be edited.
To see the results of the sharing, swipe left on any empty space or on the name of the venue to go to the Totals page. That page lists the participants and the amount each one will pay, along with details for the whole bill at the bottom of the page. Swipe right on any empty area or on the name of the venue to return to the Items page.
There are many other pages in DivisiBill (see the index), but they all exist in support of these two.
If there has been a previous crash a dialog will pop up (see it here) asking you whether you want to send it to support or not and whether or not you want to be asked again should another crash happen.
Most pages contain either a lot of individual values or lists of purchased items, participants and so on. You can select a page using the flyout menu that pulls out from the left of each main page. You can also open the flyout by clicking on the hamburger icon () at the top left corner of the page.
With lists, you can swipe individual items left or right. Swiping left deletes the item; you can usually get an item back if you deleted it by mistake. Swiping right performs a variety of actions, depending on page context (for example it uses a venue or person on the current bill). Other common actions are tap, double tap, or (rarely) press and hold.
The operating system "back" button returns to the previous page, or to the Items page if there is no previous page. If you are already on the Items page, the "back" button pops up a warning and if you press "back" again, closes the program.
If you close DivisiBill and re-run it fairly soon, it will open the last bill you were working on, after that time it will try and find a bill for a nearby venue and present that as a starting point. If you leave a bill unchanged for more than a couple of hours, that bill will be saved the next time the program starts, and a new bill with the same content as the previous one will be created. (You can see creation and update times in the Bill Properties page.) If you choose to reload a saved bill, the current bill will be saved; there's no need to explicitly save a bill except in the rare case where you want to start a brand new bill for the same venue within a couple of hours of the previous bill (DivisiBill would just edit the old bill in that case and overwrite your saved data, so you have to tell it that you want to start a new bill).