Set up your household

Setting up takes about five minutes. The order below matters a little: Equal House can only measure how fairly a household is shared once it knows who is in it and what actually gets done.

Or let Bric do it with you

The first time you open a brand-new household, Bric waves hello and asks a few quick questions: who lives there, how the house runs (who cooks, the busiest days, what would help most), a couple of jobs, something coming up, and, from version 1.16.0 of the app, your own boundaries. He adds people, jobs and a calendar entry as you answer, and keeps what he learned about the house in a house note called “About our family”. Your boundaries are kept separately, for the grown-ups only. Skip any question, or all of them. He only offers it in a household’s first day or so.

On the Free plan the calendar reaches three days ahead, so choose a date within that for the thing coming up; anything later needs Pro.

Press Finish at the end, the first time, and Bric says Your house is ready when you are back on your tasks. Skipping says nothing — skipping is an answer too.

If you skipped it, More → Set Up with Bric starts it again whenever you like. Running it again is for adding more, so it doesn’t celebrate a second time.

1. Create the family

Sign in, then give your household a name — “The Taylors”, “Flat 3”, whatever you call yourselves. You become the owner, which means you can invite people, change the kids’ sign-in code and manage the plan.

2. Add everyone who lives here

Add each adult and each child. Adults can have their own login; children never need one — they get a profile you control, and sign in on a trusted device with a picture code. See how children sign in.

For each adult you can set a capacity share: roughly how much of the household’s work it is reasonable for them to carry. Two full-time adults are usually 1.0 each. Someone working six days a week, or recovering from illness, is not — and saying so out loud is what stops the Fairness Score quietly blaming them.

3. Put the real work in

This is the step people skip, and it is the one that makes everything else work. Equal House can only share out what it can see, so the invisible jobs — remembering the dentist, packing kit bags, doing the shop — need to exist as tasks.

If you would rather not start from a blank screen, use Ready-made tasks and pick from the list. See starter chores.

4. Look at the score, then leave it alone for a week

The Fairness Score will be wrong on day one, because the app has only seen a day of your life. Give it a week of ticking things off before you read anything into it.

What next

• Invite the other adult
• Add a child
• Take the tour
• If the first go went wrong, start fresh clears the chores and calendar and keeps the family