How PLANIT works

🚀 New to PLANIT? Start here

You don't have to set everything up at once. Most families start with the calendar and the chores, and add the rest when they need it.

1. Create or join your family. One parent starts it; everybody else joins with the invite code.
2. Check the family list. Family ▾ shows everyone. Make the other grown-up a Parent.
3. Look at the calendar. If you imported the school year, it's already there.
4. Add a few chores. Start with the ones you're tired of repeating out loud.
5. Plan a week of meals and put what you need on the grocery list.
6. Photograph one important form so it stops living in a drawer.
7. Turn reminders on on each phone, if you want nudges.
8. Try asking a question: “what's on tomorrow?”
9. Use Quick add once you're comfortable: one sentence instead of a form.

Everyone in the family sees the same up-to-date information. Add something on your phone and it appears on everyone else's within a second or two.

✅ Chores

What is a chore?

A chore is a job around the house that someone needs to do: not an appointment, and not a punishment. It's the ordinary share of looking after a home:

Make your bed · Clean your room · Take out the bins · Wash the dishes · Feed the dog · Fold the laundry · Water the plants · Put the toys away · Help carry the shopping

A chore is not a calendar event

This is the one thing worth getting straight, because PLANIT has both:

Why families use it

So everyone knows who is responsible for what, so the jobs get remembered without a parent asking five times, and so children can see their own share and tick it off themselves.

How to add one

1. Open Chores.
2. Tap + Add chore.
3. Type what needs doing: “Take out the bins”.
4. Choose who it belongs to.
5. Choose whether it repeats: just once, every day, or every week.
6. Add a due date if it matters.
7. Give it points, if your family likes points.
8. Save.

Chores that repeat

Just once: “Clean the garage on Saturday”. Tick it, and it's finished.
Every day: “Make your bed”. It comes back each morning.
Every week: “Bins”. It comes back each Monday.

Ticking off a repeating chore doesn't erase the past: the points already earned stay, and the chore simply appears again next time.

Points

Points are optional. If you use them, each chore is worth what you decide, and PLANIT keeps a running total for each person for the week. Children can't change their own points, PLANIT works them out from the chore itself.

Who can do what

Parents add, edit, assign and delete chores, and see everybody's.
Children see the chores that belong to them and tick their own off. They can't tick a brother's or sister's, and they can't change what a chore is worth.

🗓️ Calendar

Everything the family has on: school events, practices, appointments, visits.

How to use it

Month shows the whole month at a glance, like a paper calendar. List shows one day after another, which is easier to read on a phone. Tap a day to add something, tap an event to change it.

Each person has a colour. Tap a name above the calendar to see only their things; tap Everyone for the events that involve the whole family.

Repeating events

Tick “every week” when you add something, and choose when it stops. Later you can change just one week, or that week and all the ones after it.

Keeping something private

A parent can mark any event 🔒 Parents only. It disappears from the children's calendar, their reminders, and their questions. They don't see a gap or a “hidden event”, they simply don't have it.

Tap a place name and it opens in Maps. Add “who's driving” and everyone stops asking.

🍽️ Meals & groceries

A week of meals on one screen, and a shopping list the whole family can add to.

Parents fill in the meal grid. Anyone can add to the grocery list and tick things off in the shop. It updates on everyone's phone as you go, so two people don't buy the same milk. Adding something that's already on the list just tells you it's there.

Tap Clear ticked when you get home to empty the trolley.

📄 Documents

The permission slips, medical forms, insurance cards and school letters that otherwise live in a drawer or a camera roll.

Getting them in

Photograph a page with the camera, PLANIT straightens it and tidies it up, or import photos and PDFs you already have. Several pages become one PDF, and you can add more pages to a document later.

Your originals are kept

PLANIT tidies a photographed page to make it easier to read, but it never throws away what you photographed. Documents that were tidied keep the original photographs too, in full colour, behind the ⬇ Original button. Colour is the normal setting, black and white is there if you want it, but you have to choose it.

Fill & sign

Open a PDF and add typed text, a tick, today's date, or your signature, drawn with a finger or typed. You can white out a mistake and type over it. Save it back as a PDF to send on.

Private documents

Mark anything 🔒 Parents only and the children can't open it. Not the entry, not the file, not through a question.

💰 Money

What came in, what went out, and what's left this month, with a category on each entry so you can see where it actually goes.

Money is for the grown-ups: parents add and edit entries, and by default children can't see the tracker at all. If you want an older child to see it (pocket money, saving up for something), a parent can switch that on for them.

⬇ Spreadsheet exports everything as a CSV for Excel or Numbers.

📌 Notes

Short messages for the whole family: “pizza night moved to Friday”, “Grandma visits Saturday”. Each note shows who wrote it and when. The newest one also appears on the Today screen.

🔔 Reminders

A notification before something starts, and a nudge in the morning for chores still to do.

Each phone turns them on for itself: Family ▾ → Reminders → Turn on reminders. You choose how far ahead to be warned. On an iPhone, PLANIT has to be opened from the Home Screen icon (Share → Add to Home Screen), Apple only allows notifications that way.

Children are only told about things they can see: their own activities, and whatever the family shares with them.

Sound alerts

For a chime and a banner you can't miss while PLANIT is open: Family ▾ → Sound alerts → Play a sound before an event. Tick as many timings as you like (when it starts, 5, 10, 15 or 30 minutes, 1 or 2 hours, or a day before), pick a sound (Chime, Bell, Beep or Gentle), set the volume, and press Play to hear it. The banner stays on screen until you dismiss it; tap it to open the event. Events with no time (“All day”) don't have an alert.

These are set on each device and only sound while PLANIT is open. With PLANIT closed, use Reminders above. The phone then plays its own notification sound, which a web app can't change.

💬 Ask PLANIT

Tap Ask and ask a question in ordinary words. It answers from your family's own information. Never anyone else's.

Most answers are worked out on your own phone, instantly and privately. Nothing leaves it.

When your phone can't answer, the question goes to Google. PLANIT sends your question along with a snapshot of what you can already see, calendar entries with their times, places and notes, chore names, the meal plan, the grocery list, notes, document names, and (for a parent) recent money entries, to Google's Gemini service, which writes the answer. It is told to answer only from that snapshot or say it doesn't know. Your documents, your files and your signature are never sent.

This is the only part of PLANIT that sends your family's information anywhere but your own database. If you would rather it never happened, a parent can leave the AI key unset. Ask PLANIT then answers only from what your phone can work out. See the Privacy page.

Ask PLANIT follows the same rules as the rest of the app: a child asking about the money or a parents-only document is told it isn't theirs to see. And a child's question sends only what that child is allowed to see.

Speaking instead of typing. The 🎤 uses your browser's own speech recognition. On Chrome and Edge that sends the audio to Google; on Safari, to Apple. PLANIT itself never receives or keeps any audio. Only the words your browser hands back. Typing does the same job with nothing listened to.

📷 Add from a photo

Most of what ends up on a family calendar arrives on paper or in an email. A school flyer, a practice schedule, a party invitation. Rather than typing it in, photograph it.

Today → 📷 Photo. Take a picture, or choose a screenshot you already have. PLANIT reads the dates and shows you what it found, with a tick beside each one.

Nothing is added until you press the button. That is deliberate: reading a photograph is guessing, not reading a file, and it can get a date wrong. Check them, especially the year on anything that only says "Fri 3 Oct".

Powered by Gemini AI. Reading the photo is the one part PLANIT hands to Google, Gemini is what turns a picture of a flyer into calendar entries. It is sent the photo and nothing else: not your calendar, not your documents, not anything else in your account.

Crop out anything private or sensitive before you send it. PLANIT sends the photo as you took it. It does not look through it for you, so whatever is in the frame goes. PLANIT never stores the picture. The same setting covers this and Ask PLANIT, and for children both are off until a parent turns them on. Full detail on the Privacy page.

Blurred or nothing dated in it? It says so and offers another go. Better light and getting closer beat a higher-resolution photo from across the room.

🎤 Quick add

One sentence instead of a form. Type it, or tap the microphone and say it.

PLANIT shows you what it understood before it saves anything, so you can fix it or cancel. This happens on your phone. Nothing is sent anywhere to work it out.

👪 Family & invites

Family ▾ lists everyone, their colour, and whether they've made an account yet.

Adding a child: no account needed

This is the normal way, and the one to prefer. Family ▾ → + Add family member puts a child in your family straight away: they get a colour, chores, their own activities on the calendar, points. No email, no password, nothing to sign in to. A parent runs it all from their own account.

A young child does not need a login. Giving one to a nine-year-old means they have an account on an online service, with everything that carries. Most families never need to.

Giving someone their own login

Worth it for another parent, or an older child who wants PLANIT on their own phone. Tap Share invite and send the code. They open PLANIT, create an account, choose Join my family, and type the code and their first name. Typing the name that's already in your family puts them into that spot, keeping their colour and everything assigned to them.

A login can only ever be added this way, a parent makes the invite, and it claims a place a parent already made. Nobody joins your family without a parent handing out a code.

Codes last 7 days. New code makes a fresh one and cancels the old.

Parents and children

Everyone joins as a Kid: always, even if they type a parent's name. A parent then changes them to Parent in the family list. That way an invite code can never hand out parent powers.

A child without an email address can use a parent's with a tag: put a + and the child's name before the @, so you@example.com becomes you+theirname@example.com. Mail still arrives in the parent's inbox.

⚙️ What each child sees

Children don't all need the same view. Under Family ▾, tap What [name] can see to choose, for each child:

Their calendar

Only their own activities: piano, football, their dentist appointment.
Their own, plus family ones: adds anything meant for everybody, like a family dinner.
Everything: the whole family's week, except anything you've locked 🔒.

What else they can do

Whether they can see the family's other chores (their own are always theirs to see), open the document shelf, see the money tracker, and whether they can add events, notes or grocery items.

See it through their eyes

Tap See it as [name] and PLANIT shows you their view, with a banner so you know you're in it. Their account isn't touched. It's only your screen.

These aren't just hidden buttons. PLANIT itself refuses the information, so the answer is the same however the app is opened.

🤖 Ask PLANIT and children

Everything else PLANIT holds stays in your own database. Ask PLANIT is the exception: when your phone cannot answer a question itself, the question, and a snapshot of what that person is allowed to see, goes to Google so the answer can be written.

For a grown-up that is a choice you can weigh up. For a child it is information about a child going to someone else, so it is off for children until a parent turns it on: Family ▾ → tap a child → Leaving PLANIT.

Turn it on for a sixteen-year-old if you like it; leave it off for a nine-year-old. Switched off, the Ask button simply is not there. And if anyone reaches it another way, PLANIT asks the database before it sends anything, so the answer is the same.

Everything else a child does, calendar, chores, documents, notes, groceries, never leaves your own database, whatever this switch says.

📊 How you use PLANIT

Family ▾ → See what the family has built up. Two different things, kept apart:

What you have built up: how many people are in the family, how much is on the calendar, how many chores are set up, how many documents you're keeping. Counted from your own information, so it is right the moment you open it.

What you have been doing: how often PLANIT is actually used, and which parts. Pick Today, 7 days, 30 days, 90 days or All time. You'll see things like how many times PLANIT was opened, chores ticked off, documents scanned, questions asked, how much was done by speaking rather than typing, and a bar for each part of the app so you can see what you use and what you don't.

What it does not know. PLANIT records that a chore was ticked off, never which chore. Not what a calendar entry says, not a document's name or contents, not an amount of money, not what you asked, and never any recording of your voice. The counts hold no readable words: everything is a fixed word from a short list, and the few values that aren't are scrambled or rounded by the database itself rather than trusted. If there's nothing to show it says “No activity yet” rather than inventing a number.

Who can see it. Parents in your own family, nobody else. Not other families, not children. Parents can download it as a spreadsheet, and there's a Clear the usage record button that removes the lot without touching anything your family made. Entries older than 400 days go the next time a parent opens the panel, and each family's record stops at 150,000 entries so it can never crowd out the things that matter.

PLANIT never shows this broken down for one child on their own. It is family totals and “how many people used PLANIT”. The records do note who did something, because that is the only way to count how many people used it; take someone out of the family and their name comes off the records, while the totals stay right.

🤝 What stays free

PLANIT might one day charge for something. Four things it will not charge for, written into the Terms so it is a promise rather than a mood:

1. Your calendar is never limited by date. Everything you have added stays visible, and you can plan as far ahead as you like. Some family apps hide anything more than 30 days out unless you pay. PLANIT will not do that to you.

2. You can always take your information with you. Family ▾ → Download a backup gives you the lot, on any plan, at any time, including after you have stopped paying for anything.

3. No advertising, ever. No ads, no advertising identifiers, nothing about your family sold or shared for marketing. On any plan.

4. Nothing you already rely on gets taken away. A paid tier would unlock new things, not fence off what you are already using.

Anything PLANIT ever charges for will be something that costs money to run. The assistant, or storing a great many documents. And you will be told before it changes.

🔒 Privacy & safety

Your family's information is yours. Every piece of it belongs to your family, and no other family can reach it. That rule lives in the database itself, not in the app's screens.

Documents are stored privately; links to them are short-lived and personal.

Backups. A parent can download everything, Family ▾ → Download a backup, and keep it somewhere safe. Worth doing now and then.

Leaving. Anyone can leave the family, and delete their account entirely, from Family ▾. The last parent has to hand over first, so a family is never left without a grown-up.

Changing your password. Family ▾ → Change my password. It asks for the one you use now (so a phone left on the table can't be used to take your account), then the new one twice. You stay signed in, here and on your other devices.

Forgotten it altogether? Forgot password? on the sign-in screen sends a reset link. But that needs email to be set up for your PLANIT, and it may not be. If no link arrives, a parent can fix it from the Supabase dashboard; see the setup guide.

📲 Put it on your phone

iPhone/iPad: open PLANIT in Safari → Share → Add to Home Screen.
Android: Chrome → ⋮ → Install app.
Computer: Chrome or Edge → the install icon in the address bar. On a Mac, Safari → File → Add to Dock.

It then opens like any other app, and works offline for what you've already loaded. You'll see a banner telling you when you're offline, and things you type are kept until you're back.

The A a button at the top makes all the text bigger, three sizes, remembered on that phone. Next to it, the moon or sun switches between light and dark.