Live Household Balance Dashboard: What It Shows and Why
The EvenUS dashboard shows the current week's household balance, computed live: the direction things are moving, where the hours sit, and one idea to try.
The live household balance dashboard is the EvenUS This week tab, the first of its five tabs (This week, Money, Effort, Insights and Us). It shows the current week, calculated live from what you and your partner have logged, so a chore you tick off or an expense you add is reflected straight away. It leads with the direction things are moving, then where the hours sit between you, then one suggested change for the week. Older weeks come from saved weekly summaries rather than live data.
This article explains what is on the dashboard, why it is arranged the way it is, and what it deliberately leaves out. EvenUS is in closed testing, so details may still change.
What does the household balance dashboard show?
Five things, in a fixed order, from top to bottom.
- A warning, when one applies. If both of you look overloaded, or there is too little logged to say anything useful, that message comes first and replaces the trend.
- The trend, in one sentence. Whether the week is moving towards balance or away from it. Direction, not a number.
- The gap. Roughly how many hours a week sit between you, which you can tap for the full breakdown.
- This week's idea. One specific swap, with who, what and why now.
- The check-in and recent activity. A prompt for the private weekly check-in, and a short list of what has been logged lately.
The Insights tab is one tap away, with the overall score, the time and money breakdowns, and the full weekly sums.
What does "live" actually mean here?
The current week is recalculated as entries arrive, rather than waiting for an overnight report. Weeks run Monday to Sunday.
Say it is Wednesday evening. Jordan finishes the bathroom, which is logged at 30 minutes, and marks it done. The current week's hours update at once, and the gap line reflects it. If Maya adds the £48 supermarket shop a few minutes later, the money side updates too.
There is a practical reason for this. A chore you have just finished that changes nothing for a quarter of an hour feels like a broken app, and people stop logging. Calculating one week live is cheap and keeps the screen honest about the present.
Why older weeks are not live
Previous weeks, and the trend across them, come from weekly summaries saved in the background. They can lag the current state by a few minutes. That is deliberate: recalculating months of history on a phone every time you open the app would be slow and wasteful, and history does not need to be live. It also means editing a chore today does not quietly rewrite last month, because each completed chore keeps the time it took when it was done.
Why isn't the fairness score at the top of the This week tab?
Because a big number at the top of the screen reads as a verdict, and the dashboard is meant to start conversations, not settle them.
Picture Sam opening the app first thing on a Monday and seeing a low number before Alex is even awake. Whatever the number is, the first thing it does is make one of them defensive. So the This week tab leads with direction and with something to do, and keeps the score one tap away for when you want it.
Direction also matters more than position. A household at 60 and improving is in a better place than one at 75 and sliding, and the dashboard is built to say so. How the EvenUS fairness score works explains what the score is built from.
How is the balance calculated?
From discretionary time: the hours each of you has left that are genuinely your own.
A week has 168 hours. Take away sleep and unavoidable personal time, then paid work, commuting, household work and childcare, and the planning and remembering each of you holds, counted as hours like everything else. What remains is free time, and balance means both of you ending up with a similar amount.
A simple worked example: suppose Priya and Tom each have 98 hours to allocate after sleep (8 hours a night) and personal time (2 hours a day). Priya works 38 paid hours, commutes 5 and has 31 hours of housework and planning, leaving 24. Tom works 45 paid hours, commutes 5 and has 20 at home, leaving 28. The gap is 4 hours a week. The dashboard would describe that gap, not who caused it.
Money sits on a separate axis and is never converted into hours. You can see it in Insights, under Money.
What does the dashboard deliberately leave out?
Anything that turns a household into a contest.
| Not on the dashboard | Why |
|---|---|
| Streaks or badges | A streak punishes whoever had a hard week. |
| A "who did more" leaderboard | It makes your partner an opponent. |
| A button to nudge your partner | Chasing each other is not the app's job. |
| Red warnings or failure words | A low week is information, not a judgement. |
| Sharing to social media | Your household is nobody else's business. |
When does the dashboard show a warning instead?
When the numbers would be misleading. In those weeks a plain message replaces the trend line, because showing both would give you two claims to reconcile.
- Both overloaded. Two people with very little free time each are evenly matched and still struggling. That is flagged rather than shown as success.
- Too little data. A week with almost nothing logged is flagged as thin instead of producing a confident-looking result.
- Logging has stopped. The person doing the most is often the one with least time to log it, so a quiet week is treated as missing information, not missing work.
If things stay difficult for around two months with no movement, the app stops suggesting swaps, says so honestly once, points towards a counsellor, and goes quiet for a while.
How should you use the dashboard?
Glance at it, act on the one idea, and leave the deeper reading for the weekly report. It is not designed to be checked hourly.
A good rhythm for most couples: add your chores and bills once, log as you go or use the weekly catch-up, look at this week's idea together once, and read the weekly fairness report when it arrives. Your first 30 days with EvenUS covers what the first month usually looks like. If you want to see the hours calculation before setting anything up, the free household fairness calculator runs a simplified version with no account.
Common questions
Do both partners see the same dashboard?
Yes, the household picture is shared. Each person's private weekly check-in answers are readable only by the person who answered, and that is enforced in the database rather than simply hidden on screen.
What if only one of us logs anything?
You still get a result, but the app flags thin or one-sided data rather than presenting it as the full picture.
Does the dashboard connect to our bank account?
No. There is no bank connection and no tracking of phone data. Everything comes from what the two of you enter.