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, the general model is you start from an old bill and edit it to describe a new one. DivisiBill will save the old one automatically.
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 stored lists of people or venues are saved automatically when they change can be downloaded.
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) you'll see 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 at the bottom of the page for the whole bill. 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 you want to be asked the 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 usually swipe individual items left or right. Swiping left deletes the item; you can usually get it back if you deleted it by mistake. Swiping right performs a variety of actions, depending on page context. Other actions are tap, press and hold, or (occasionally) double tap.
The operating system "back" button returns to the previous page, or to the Totals or Items page if there is no previous page. If you are already on the Items or Totals page, the "back" button exits the program.
If you close DivisiBill and re-run it later, it will open the last bill you were working on. 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).