Kutumb — a shared circle across households
A kutumb links people from different Sahidha families — a couple and their parents, siblings running separate households, an extended family with a shared property — so they can see a combined picture of exactly the accounts they choose to share, while every family's finances otherwise stay completely separate.
The word is deliberate: not a merger, not a super-family — a circle.
How a kutumb forms
- Someone creates it (Accounts & lists → Kutumb → New). The creator becomes its owner.
- The owner invites people by email — and the invitee must belong to a different family (same-family invites are rejected; inside one family you'd use ordinary sharing instead). Invitations expire after 14 days.
- Each invitee accepts from their own login. Nobody can be added to a kutumb by someone else — joining is individual consent, recorded from the joiner's own session. Pending invitations appear on your own Kutumb screen.
Only active members with logins can join — managed persons (someone whose finances a guardian looks after) are never kutumb members.
What gets shared — and what never does
Joining a kutumb shares nothing by itself. After joining, each member independently picks which of their own accounts to share into the circle. That's the entire surface:
| Kutumb members can | Kutumb members cannot |
|---|---|
| See the shared accounts — name, bank, owner, balance | See any account that wasn't explicitly shared |
| See transactions on those shared accounts | Add, edit, or delete anything — it's strictly read-only |
| See who the other members are, with their family names | See the rest of each other's families' data |
| See the shared-surface net worth (the shared accounts summed) | Pull each other's reports, budgets, or holdings |
Two further boundaries worth knowing:
- Sharing is personal, not family-wide. When Raj shares an account into a kutumb, the members of that kutumb see it — not every member of their families. Cross-household visibility never broadcasts.
- You can only share what you own. Personally-owned accounts, plus — if you manage a family entity such as an HUF — that entity's accounts.
Leaving, revoking, unwinding
- Unshare an account any time — only the person who shared it can withdraw it.
- Leave the kutumb any time. If the owner leaves, ownership passes to the longest-standing remaining member; if the last member leaves, the kutumb and all its shares are deleted.
- Transactions already recorded in each family are untouched by any of this — revoking a share removes visibility going forward, it doesn't rewrite anyone's books.
Kutumb vs. same-family sharing
| Within one family | Kutumb | |
|---|---|---|
| Who's involved | Members of the same family | Individuals from 2+ different families |
| How you join | You're a member already | Email invitation + your own acceptance |
| What's visible by default | Family-scoped items per the family's sharing grants | Nothing until someone shares an account |
| What the other side can do | Per their role — members can create and edit | Read-only, always |
| Leaving | Members don't "leave" their family's books | Leave any time, unilaterally |
If two households want more than read-only visibility — genuinely shared books — that's a family merge, a much bigger step. For most extended families, a kutumb over the handful of genuinely shared accounts is the right tool, precisely because everything else stays independent.