Wedding gifts · for families who record cash and gold gifts at weddings and family events
GiftTally is a gift ledger for families who receive cash and gold at weddings and other family events, and who give it back when the other family's turn comes. For each event you note who gave what: an envelope of cash, two çeyrek coins, a 22K bracelet by weight. GiftTally keeps a running balance with every person, so before their daughter's wedding you can see exactly what you still owe back. Gold stays recorded as gold, and it is valued at a price you type in yourself.
Add guests as the envelopes and coins come in: name, relation, cash, and gold by kind and weight. The moment you save, GiftTally sets the gift against what you gave that person before and shows the balance, such as one çeyrek and ₺1,000 still to return. Pick guests from your contacts so a name is spelled the same way at every event.
Coins and bracelets are recorded the way they were given: thirty-one çeyrek, a 20 g bracelet in 22K, five grams of 24K. You type the price for each unit you use, and GiftTally values the whole event with it. When gold moves, change the price and the totals follow, while the coins stay coins.
Tap a name to see everything that passed between you: what they gave at your daughter's wedding, what you gave at their son's, and the balance either way. Note the date of their next family event and GiftTally reminds you before it comes.
Many families who give gold and cash at weddings already keep a record. A 2023 column in the Turkish daily Hürriyet quoted a 68-year-old woman whose notebook lists, wedding by wedding, who pinned what on her children, what she gave back, what she still owes, and even the lira price she paid at the time. Researchers writing in the Indonesian journal el Buhuth describe hosts who note each wedding envelope carefully, because it is expected to come back when the giver holds a similar event. In Vietnam, VnExpress has reported on people who keep a notebook of wedding gifts and go back to it to see who reciprocated.
Paper does the job until it doesn't. The notebook sits in one house. Totals are added by hand. Names drift into three spellings over ten years of weddings. And the hardest question, what a gold gift from years ago is worth today, cannot be answered by a figure written down at the time.
VnExpress told the story of a woman who gave her cousin one mace of gold at the cousin's wedding in 2016, worth about VND3.5 million then. When she married in August 2024, the cousin gave back VND3.5 million in cash, by which point the same mace was worth about VND8 million. She had expected it back in kind. In Turkey, a gold market expert told Hürriyet that a çeyrek, the quarter coin guests pin at weddings, had cost 150 lira about ten years earlier.
GiftTally records gold the way it was handed over: the kind, the count, the karat and the weight. A çeyrek stays a çeyrek, and a bracelet stays 20 grams of 22K. To see a money value, you type the price you want to use for each unit, perhaps the figure your jeweler quoted this morning, and the event is valued with it. Change the price next month and every total follows. There is no live price feed, so the number on screen is always one you chose.
Choose the tradition you keep, and GiftTally uses its event types, gold units, currency and words. Customs differ between regions and between families, so the app records what happened and never suggests what anyone should give.
Turkey, takı. Daily Sabah describes the gold-adorning ceremony in which relatives and friends pin gold coins or banknotes on the couple, often on a sash. Quarter, half and full gold coins are also popular gifts at circumcision feasts.
India, shagun. Cash gifts are often given in amounts ending in one, such as ₹501. The Quint explains the extra rupee as a small debt: the receiver is expected to come to the giver's next occasion and return the shagun.
Indonesia, amplop. Going kondangan, attending a wedding reception, typically means bringing an envelope of money, and in several regions hosts write down the amount in each one.
Vietnam, mừng cưới. Guests give the couple cash or gold, and some people keep a notebook of who gave what.
Korea and Japan. At many Korean weddings a table at the entrance takes envelopes of chuguigeum next to a guest book, which the Korea Herald notes doubles as a log of who contributed. In Japan, shūgi is congratulatory money for weddings and births and kōden is condolence money at funerals; Nippon.com notes that a return gift for shūgi is usually set at a share of the amount received.
The usual moment is the night of the event or the morning after, with a bag of envelopes and a tray of coins on the table. Add each gift as you open it: pick the guest from your contacts or type a name, set the relation, enter the cash and any gold by kind and weight, and add a memo if the envelope came with a note. Every save updates that guest's balance and the event totals.
Gifts go the other way too. When you attend a neighbor's circumcision feast or a colleague's wedding, log what you gave, and it lands on the same person's page. Over a few years that page becomes your family's real history with theirs.
When the record needs to leave the phone, export it. A PDF prints cleanly for a parent who wants it on paper, and a CSV opens in any spreadsheet for the sibling who likes formulas.
It is not a wedding planner. There are no invitations, seating charts, budgets or vendor lists, and no gift registry. It does not collect money or connect to a bank, and it does not pull gold prices from the internet. It does not judge whether a gift was generous enough. A balance is a number; what you do with it is a family decision.
There is no account and nothing to sync. The ledger lives on your phone and works without a connection, which also means that sharing it with relatives is done by sending them an exported file.
Enter it by kind, karat and weight, for example a 22K bracelet of 20 grams. Coins are entered by type and count, such as two çeyrek. GiftTally keeps the gold in those units and only turns it into money when you look at a value.
From you. Type the price for each unit you use, per gram of 22K or 24K or per coin, and GiftTally values every gold gift with it. There is no automatic price feed, so the figure matches whatever source your family trusts.
There is no shared account and no sync. Export the list as a PDF or CSV and send it to whoever needs it.
On your phone. GiftTally has no account and works offline.
No. Events can be weddings, engagements, henna nights, circumcision feasts, births, funerals or Diwali, and the event types follow the tradition you pick.
No. It shows what was given in each direction and the balance between you. How much to give back is your decision.
Pick the channel you use.
