How the money works

Once a raffle is running, you'll see the same three terms turn up across your analytics, your reports, your payout statements, and your remittance emails. They're worth a minute to understand once, because they're the spine of everything financial about your raffle.

The short version: the difference between the categories isn't online vs in-person — it's who processes the payment.

The three numbers

💳 RaffleLink Sales

Sales that RaffleLink processes for you through our payment provider (Stripe). The money flows into RaffleLink, the platform fee comes off the top, and the rest lands in your bank account through scheduled payouts.

Today this covers:

• Online ticket purchases on your raffle page (card and wallet payments — Apple Pay, Google Pay, PayPal).

Coming soon:

• Stripe Tap-to-Pay at the Ticket Booth, so sellers can take card payments through RaffleLink on their phone. Those will land in this bucket too.

💵 Cash & POS Sales

Sales you've collected directly yourself. The money never touches RaffleLink — it goes straight from the buyer to you at the event. Today this means:

• Cash taken at the Ticket Booth.
• EFTPOS or your own POS terminal at the booth (your bank's machine, not RaffleLink's).
• Anything you've marked as "Other" at the booth checkout.

Because RaffleLink doesn't process this money, there's no platform fee on these sales, and they're not part of your RaffleLink payout — you already have them.

🤝 Net Fundraise

The total of what your raffle actually raises for your organisation. It's the headline number on your analytics for a reason — it's the only one that answers "how much have we really brought in?"

Net Fundraise = RaffleLink Sales − platform fee
              + Cash & POS Sales (already yours)
              + Fee Assistance (extra buyers chipped in)

You can read about Fee Assistance — supporters covering RaffleLink's fee on your behalf — in its own article.

Why the distinction matters

The category isn't about where the sale happened — it's about who handled the money. A booth sale taken in cash and a booth sale taken on a card (once Tap-to-Pay arrives) happen in the same workspace at the same event, but they land in different buckets because cash is yours straight away and card payments are processed through RaffleLink.

The same idea applies to your fee, your payouts, and how voids and refunds work:

• Fees apply only to RaffleLink Sales.
• Payouts only include RaffleLink Sales; Cash & POS doesn't get "paid out" because you already collected it.
• Refunds for RaffleLink Sales come back to the buyer's card through us. For Cash & POS sales, you hand the money back yourself at the event (more on voiding offline sales).

Once that one distinction lands, the rest of this section is mostly mechanics.