Every credit has a reason written next to it

The problem

Why is an unexplained balance the real argument, not the chores themselves?

A point written in pen on a fridge chart records that a point was given. It does not record what it was given for. A month later the total is a number nobody can explain, and a number nobody can explain is a number a child can argue with, reasonably, because there is genuinely nothing to point back to.

The balance is never a matter of memory once every entry carries its own reason. You do not need to remember why one child has more credits than another this week, or why a number looks lower than expected, because the ledger already says why, in order, next to every entry that ever moved it.

This matters most exactly when a parent cannot be physically present for the day-to-day: working away, travelling, or simply not the one in the room when a task got approved. A co-parent reading the ledger later sees the same reasons the approving parent saw at the time, not a secondhand summary, which is the entire point of two parents sharing one ledger rather than each running their own private count of what a child has done.

The child's side

What does a child see when a balance changes without warning?

A silent change to a balance reads as arbitrary, even when the parent behind it had a perfectly good reason. A manual bonus or a manual deduction in Reward Study always carries a reason the child can see, whether it is praise for something outside the task list, such as helping a neighbour, or a consequence for something that broke a household rule.

That visibility runs both ways. A child who disagrees with a deduction can at least see the stated reason rather than guessing at one, which turns a possible argument about fairness into, at worst, a conversation about a specific decision. Nothing pays out without your approval in the first place, and the ledger is what proves that after the fact.

The same record backs the weekly progress card a child sees on their own side: bars for the week, a comparison against an earlier window, and totals since the household started, all read directly from the same entries the ledger keeps. Since 1.8.1 that reading was widened so a hand-awarded credit with a reason counts as the child doing something, while a deduction never does, which keeps the progress view honest about effort rather than just about the current balance. None of that would be possible if entries were plain numbers instead of records with a reason attached to each one.

The mechanism

What exactly does the ledger record, and what does the export contain?

Every entry in the ledger carries the same shape: what happened, the reason behind it, who issued it, and, where one exists, a link back to the specific task or reward involved. That link is what turns the ledger from a list of numbers into an actual history you or your child can trace, entry by entry, back to a specific chore, a specific approval, or a specific reward redeemed.

On Pro, that full history exports as a CSV with nine columns, with every date in ISO 8601 format so the file opens cleanly in any spreadsheet program:

• Date
• Kid
• Type
• Amount
• Reason
• Issuer
• Linked task
• Linked reward
• Reversal-of

The export is scoped to one household, so a family running two households never sees one ledger bleed into the other by accident, and a file generated for one is never mixed with the other's history.

The reversal-of column exists because the approvals queue itself allows an undo: a parent can approve, reject with a note, approve everything waiting at once, or undo either action afterward. When an approval gets undone, the ledger does not simply delete the original entry and pretend it never happened. It records the reversal as its own entry, linked back to the one it cancels, so the CSV always shows what was originally decided and what changed it, rather than quietly rewriting history.

Who can see it

Why does exporting the ledger need your parent PIN?

The CSV export is gated two ways at once: it is a Pro feature, and it sits behind your parent PIN even if a device is already unlocked. A full financial history of a child, including every reason a parent ever gave for a deduction, is exactly the kind of record that should not be one accidental tap away from a child holding the family iPad.

That PIN is the same one that gates every other parent action in the app, stored as a salted, stretched hash in the device's own Keychain rather than anywhere the export itself could read or leak it. There is no device-passcode fallback behind it either, so a child who happens to know how to unlock the phone still cannot reach the export.

None of this means the ledger goes anywhere on its own. It lives in the household's own iCloud like everything else in the app, and the CSV is a file you generate and hold yourself when you want one, not a report anyone else ever sees, since Reward Study runs no server of its own to send it to in the first place. If you want the full picture of what Pro unlocks, including the export, it is laid out on pricing.