How the allowance app works · about 10 minutes to set up
From nothing to your first payday
Six steps. You’ll do the first three once, and then the system runs itself until you want to change something.
Create your family
Pick a family name and how often allowance is paid. Everyone in the household — you, any other parent, and each child — lives inside this one family, and nobody outside it can see any of it.
Your family name is also what your children type when they log in, so keep it short and easy to spell.
Choose the payday rhythm your child can hold in their head: weekly under ten, monthly for teenagers.
Add each child
Children don’t need an email address or an account of their own. You give each one a username and a PIN, and that’s how they log in — on the family tablet, a phone, or any browser.
This is also where you set their base allowance: the amount that arrives every period no matter what. Start lower than feels generous; you can always raise it.
Let them choose their own username. It’s the first bit of ownership and it costs you nothing.
Build the job list
Two kinds of job. A one-off is a single task with a due date — “help wash the car on Saturday”. A recurring job is a template that regenerates on its own: daily, weekly, or monthly, on the days you choose.
Recurring jobs are the ones that make the difference. Set “make your bed” once as a daily job and it appears every morning without you touching it again. They’re part of Premium, and your first 30 days include it, so you can build the list while you decide.
Three recurring jobs per child is plenty to start. A list of twelve gets ignored by Wednesday.
Your child marks work done
They log in with the family name, their username and PIN, and see only their own list: what’s due, what it’s worth, and what they’ve earned so far this period.
Marking a job done doesn’t pay them. It moves the job into your queue and tells you there’s something to look at — which is exactly the conversation you want to be having.
Their dashboard shows no ads, ever, on any plan. That’s built into the app, not a preference.
You approve it — or you don’t
Completed jobs land in your queue. You approve, and the value counts toward this period’s total. You reject, and it goes back on their list to be done properly.
A one-off job that’s never done and passes its due date is marked missed automatically and earns nothing. No argument, no reminder from you — the deadline does the work.
Approve on the same day where you can. A three-day gap between finishing and being paid breaks the link you’re trying to build.
Payday closes the period
When the period ends, each child’s base plus their approved jobs is totalled and locked into history. You pay however you already pay — cash, a transfer, a jar on the shelf. The app keeps the record.
The reporting view then shows the thing that’s genuinely useful over time: whether the earned half is growing, and which jobs keep getting missed.
Coming soon
The iOS and Android apps are on the way
They’re in the works now. Until they land, Child Allowance runs in any browser, on a phone as well as a laptop — add it to your home screen for one-tap access, including your child’s own login.
Nothing you set up now needs redoing. The same family, children and history carry straight over when the apps arrive.