Plan a party

A party is a small project with a hard deadline, and it usually lands on one person. It does not have to be a child’s: a fortieth, a retirement do and a grandparent’s eightieth all work the same way. The age is optional, and leaving it off simply means the gift ideas suit anybody.

1. More → Parties → Add party, or from the calendar: Add event, then choose Party as the kind. The form becomes the party planner, keeping anything you have already filled in. Already put it in the calendar as an event? From version 1.16.0 of the app, open it, choose Party as its kind, and the event becomes the party rather than a second entry beside it. That works for an event that happens once; a repeating one stays an event.
2. Type whose party it is under Who’s the party for?. Their age, further down under About them, is optional, and 0 is fine for a christening.
3. Tap the faces of whoever from the family is going, or Everyone.
4. Set the date, the venue and the times.
5. Under Getting there, tap the grown-up who is driving. For a driver from outside the family, tap Someone else and type their name.
6. Tap Add party in the bar at the bottom. The line beside it says who is going and when, and reminds you that the party comes with 3 tasks: the lift, a card and the present.

What a party holds

• Timings — when it starts, when the entertainer arrives, when the cake happens
• Transport — who is collecting whom, which is the part that goes wrong
• The invitation — snap or paste one you have received and Equal House reads the details out of it
• Jobs — the lift, a card and the present become ordinary tasks, so they count in the fairness picture like any other work

Each of those jobs is a grown-up’s, and goes to whichever adult has had least on lately, the same way any other job is shared out. A driver you pick from the family keeps the lift. To hand a job to another grown-up, use Reassign: anyone the job is not for, such as a child, is shown greyed out with the reason. To give one to a teenager anyway, tap it, choose Edit and pick their face under Who.

The jobs are listed on the party’s own page. Tap the circle beside one to tick it off there, and tap again to put it back. Ticking the last one says Everything’s ready for the party. See it on the calendar takes you to the party’s day.

Reading the invitation again

A party with a photo of its invitation wears that photo on its card in the list, with the party’s own picture as a sticker on its corner. Tap the photo to read it full screen, and pinch to zoom in on the small print. Tapping anywhere else on the card opens the party, as usual. A PDF invitation shows as a document instead, and opens in your phone’s PDF reader. A party without an invitation keeps its own picture.

The invitation is kept until the day after the party, then tidied away.

Once it has happened

A party drops out of the main list the day after it happens and moves into Past parties at the bottom of the screen. Nothing is deleted: the chores it created already counted towards the fairness picture, and opening the section is how you get back to them.

Deleting a party

Removing a party keeps any chores that were already done. The party is gone; the record of who did the work is not, because deleting an event should not quietly rewrite last week’s fairness.

Parties you are invited to

The same screen handles a party someone in the house is going to — date, address, whether you are staying, what time to collect. Snapping the invitation is usually faster than typing it.

From version 1.16.0 of the app you can also start from the Bric tab: An invitation under Bric can read… reads it the same way.