The list that stops being true
Most gift lists start accurate and drift. You buy something in a shop and mean to write it down. A fortnight later you cannot remember whether the book was bought or was only an idea you liked, so you buy it twice or not at all. Something wrapped in September turns up, still wrapped, in March.
The fix is not more discipline. It is a list where each gift carries its own state, so what is left is something you read instead of something you reconstruct.
Give every gift a stage
In GiftTracker each gift sits at one status. To Buy is anything you have not bought. Bought is paid for. Wrapped is ready to give. Open a gift, tap the status you want, and it saves as you tap.
Three words, and between them they answer the questions that matter in December: what still needs buying, what has been paid for, and what is finished.
Filter to what is still outstanding
Tap the gifts count on Home to open Gifts, where you can filter by event, person or status. Filtering to To Buy a week before Christmas shows what is genuinely outstanding, instead of leaving you to read the whole list and do the subtraction in your head.
Add a stage that matches how you shop
Three stages do not suit everybody. If most of your shopping is online there is a gap between paying for something and holding it, and a status of your own called Ordered fills it.
Where you put it decides what it means. Before Bought, its gifts still count as money you expect to spend. At or after Bought, they count as spent. The guide to gift statuses covers that, and it is worth getting right before the totals start to matter.
Wrapped is the one people skip
Marking something Bought feels worth doing. Marking it Wrapped feels like admin, right up until the last week, when the question stops being what you have bought and becomes what is left to do. A list that keeps the two apart answers that in a glance, instead of sending you round the cupboards to check.
Nothing you never got round to is lost
When the occasion is over, archive the Event. Anything still unbought moves to that Recipient’s Saved for later, so an idea you liked but never acted on is waiting next year rather than disappearing with the occasion. Everything you did buy stays in the Event archive with what it cost.
Update it where you are standing
Once you are set up, GiftTracker works with no connection. You can mark something Bought at the counter, in a shop with no signal, and it syncs when you are back on one. The gap between buying something and recording it is where a list usually starts going wrong, so it helps to be able to close it on the spot.
A worked example
Your sister has three things on her list: a book, a scarf and a set of paints. The book arrives, so it goes to Bought. You wrap it on a quiet evening and move it to Wrapped. The scarf you buy in a shop and mark Bought at the counter. The paints are still To Buy.
A fortnight later none of that has to be remembered. Filtering to To Buy shows the paints and nothing else. Wrapped shows the one thing that is genuinely finished.
Where to start
One Event, the people you are buying for, and a status on every gift as you go. If watching the spending matters as much as tracking the gifts, read How to set a gift budget and keep track of it.
