What Is Shower Tally?

By Joseph Sharaya, OTD, OTR/L, CHT · Occupational therapist · Updated September 10, 2026

Shower Tally is a family shower-tracking app. Every person in the household, and every pet, gets a card showing when they last showered and whether they are Fresh, Due Soon, or Overdue. Anyone in the family can log a shower with one tap, and the board updates for everyone. It is a digital replacement for a paper shower chart or the whiteboard on the fridge.

This page is the full description: what it does, exactly what the three statuses mean, who it is built for, and what it does not do.

What problem does it solve?

Showering leaves no evidence, so the record ends up living in one person's head.

Dishes and laundry announce themselves when they are skipped. A shower does not. A day later nobody can say with confidence when the last one happened, which produces two recurring failures in most households. Either it gets skipped because everyone assumed someone else handled it, or two people raise it on the same day and the person on the receiving end experiences that as nagging.

Underneath both is a record-keeping problem, not a hygiene problem. Shower Tally is a shared answer to one question: when was the last one, and who is due?

How does it work?

1. Create a family and add the people who live in your household, plus any pets.
2. Share the family invite code with anyone else who should see the board.
3. Tap a card when someone showers. Anyone in the family can log for anyone.
4. Each card's status recalculates from the date of that person's last shower.
5. The top of the board counts who is overdue and who is fresh, and says so when someone needs a shower.

There is no setup beyond that, and no per-person account required. One person with the app is enough to keep a household board current.

What do Fresh, Due Soon, and Overdue mean?

The three statuses are calculated from the number of days since a person's last logged shower, measured against their shower schedule. The default schedule is three days.

• Fresh — fewer days have passed than the schedule allows. On the default three-day schedule, that is the day of the shower and the day after.
• Due Soon — one day short of the schedule. On the default, day two.
• Overdue — the schedule has been reached or passed. On the default, day three onward. The card turns coral.

A newly added person shows a neutral status rather than Overdue until their first shower is logged, so nobody starts in the red. With Pro, each person's schedule can be set anywhere from one to seven days, which moves all three thresholds with it.

Who is Shower Tally for?

Households with more than one person in them

This is the core case. The more people involved, the worse the memory problem gets, and the more a single shared board is worth. Up to six people plus pets.

Parents tracking children

A predictable schedule that everyone can see removes the most common source of the nightly argument, which is a disputed fact about when the last shower actually was. There is more on the wider problem in our guide to getting kids to shower without a fight.

Families coordinating an older parent's care

When siblings and a paid aide are all involved, the schedule usually lives in a group text or in one person's memory. A shared board means everyone reads the same record, so a bath is not skipped or raised twice. Our guide on an aging parent who refuses to shower covers the harder half of that problem, which is the refusal itself.

Autistic children and step-by-step routines

Where bathing is hard because the order of steps is hard to hold, the Pro routine timer presents your own sequence one step at a time. Visual activity schedules, which is what that is, are considered an evidence-based practice for autistic people and have been used for daily living skills from preschool through adulthood. A timed sequence also shows how much is left, which can make a brief unpleasant experience feel bounded rather than open-ended — a common clinical practice, though we know of no controlled trials of timers in autism specifically. What it cannot do is change the sensory input itself, which is often the bigger obstacle, and it is not a treatment for autism. Our guide on helping an autistic child shower separates the three problems that get confused here.

One person building a routine

Shower Tally works for a single person, and the free tier is built for exactly that: one card, your own history, your own streak. The Pro routine timer walks you through your own shower steps one at a time, which is useful if the difficulty is less about remembering and more about starting and sequencing.

Externalizing structure and self-monitoring are not motivational tricks. They are core components of established ADHD interventions. A meta-analysis of organizational skills training across 12 randomized trials involving 1,054 children with ADHD found moderate to large improvements in organizational skills. Cognitive behavioral therapy for adults with persistent ADHD symptoms, which teaches the same skills, outperformed an active control in a randomized trial, with 53% of participants responding against 23%.

Shower Tally is built on that approach. It has not itself been studied, and it is not a treatment for anything. If it helps, it helps by holding a routine somewhere other than your own working memory, which is the part the research suggests is worth moving outside your head. There is more on this in why showering feels impossible with ADHD.

Can it replace a paper shower chart or a bathroom whiteboard?

Yes, and that is what it was built to be. A chart and a whiteboard do the same job: they hold the routine somewhere other than a parent's memory. Three things change when the record is digital:

• It is shared rather than located. A whiteboard only works for whoever is standing in front of it. A board on your phone works from the car, the office, or another house.
• The history survives. Nothing gets wiped, splashed, or thrown out with last month's grid.
• The status updates itself. Days pass and cards change on their own. Nobody has to redraw anything.

For one person in one home, a chart on the fridge is often entirely sufficient, and there is no reason to install anything. The case for a shared app gets stronger with each additional person who needs to see the same picture.

Does it know when someone showered?

No. Someone has to log it. There is no sensor, no timer running in the bathroom, and no automatic detection of any kind. Shower Tally records what people tell it and does the date arithmetic. That is deliberate: the app sees nothing it is not told.

Does it remind people?

Two kinds of reminder, both opt-in and both requiring notification permission:

• A reminder for yourself, scheduled on your own device for when your next shower comes due.
• A nudge you send to someone else in the family, which arrives in their in-app inbox. Pro lets you write your own nudge messages.

Nobody is reminded without notifications being turned on, and a household can use the board with no reminders at all.

What Shower Tally does not do

Worth being direct about, because tracking tools get oversold:

• It does not make anyone shower. It records a routine; it does not create willingness. If the hard part in your house is refusal rather than tracking, an app is not the missing piece.
• It does not decide when anyone needs to bathe. You set the schedule. Appropriate frequency varies with age, activity, skin condition, and health, and it is not the app's call. Our age-by-age guide covers what the dermatology and paediatric bodies actually recommend.
• It is not a medical, diagnostic, or treatment tool, and it does not treat ADHD, dementia, depression, or anything else.
• It is not a compliance or documentation system. Care settings that need auditable records of activities of daily living should use the documentation system their agency requires. This is a lightweight visual aid, not a record of care.
• It does not detect anything on its own, as above.

What is free and what is Pro?

The app is free to download and the core tracker is free to keep.

• Free — track one person, one-tap logging, the three-day schedule, streaks, and the real-time shared board.
• Pro — your whole household, the guided routine timer, hair-wash tracking, a custom schedule per person from one to seven days, pets, and custom nudge messages. $1.99 a month or $14.99 a year.

A new household gets a seven-day trial of the full feature set when it is created, so the whole board can be set up before deciding anything.

Where can you get it?

Shower Tally is available for iPhone on the App Store and for Android on Google Play. It is made by WristSkill Labs, LLC.

One shared board. Who's Fresh, who's due.

Free to download, free to keep for one person. iPhone and Android.

Download on theApp Store Get it onGoogle Play