It started with a fax machine.

I used to work at an airport. Most days a group of us would order banh mi from a bakery down the road. Someone would pass around a sheet of paper, everyone wrote down what they wanted, and we’d hand over our cash to whoever was running it that day. Then they’d fax the page to the bakery.

A fax. It was gloriously old school and, annoyingly, it worked.

Later I moved into a corporate office, where we did exactly the same thing with better technology and somehow more friction: a shared Excel spreadsheet, a long email thread, someone chasing people for the $14.50 they still owed three days later. The paper version had been faster.

That’s the whole idea behind LunchTrolley. One person sets up the order, one link goes out, everyone picks their own meal with their own extras, and the maths is done for you. No spreadsheet, no thread, nobody dividing a bill by seven and arguing about who had the extra side.

Right now LunchTrolley doesn’t touch the money at all. Your colleagues pay you directly — PayID, bank transfer, cash — and both sides tick a box to say what happened. That’s deliberate, and everything about how the product works follows from it: we never hold your money, so there’s nothing for us to lose, take a cut of, or fail to refund.

It’s also the part I most want to improve. Ticking boxes is better than a spreadsheet, but it’s still bookkeeping, and the coordinator is still the one doing it. Having LunchTrolley track payments properly is the obvious next step.

It’s not a step I can take just by writing the code. Handling other people’s money in Australia brings licensing obligations, and working out what would actually be required — and whether that’s realistic for something this small — comes first. That’s where it sits today: being looked into properly, with no date attached and nothing promised. When there’s something real to say, it’ll be said plainly here.

In the meantime, what’s here is free, and it stays that way.

Who’s behind it

LunchTrolley is built and run by Parker Howard, a sole trader in Australia. It is a small operation, which is why the pages about money say exactly what they mean. If something here is unclear or wrong, email me — it comes straight to me.