See your sales, revenue and payouts

When you're running a gathering — a kirtan night, a weekend retreat, a festival with three stages — you're actually asking two different money questions at two different times. Right after you open ticket sales, you want to know what sold: how many tickets, how much revenue, over what stretch of time. Later, usually when a promoter is asking to be paid or you're checking your own bank balance, you want to know where that money actually is — how much is still settling with Stripe, how much has landed, and what you still owe someone else. BrightStar keeps these as two separate surfaces instead of one blended dashboard, because conflating them is exactly what causes the confusing moment where a report says you sold plenty of tickets and your bank account doesn't show anything close to that yet. Reports answers the first question. Payouts answers the second. Both read your live data directly, so there's no spreadsheet step between what happened at your door and what you see on screen.

Revenue Summary gives you total revenue, fees, discounts, refunds and net earnings broken out per event — open this one when someone asks how a single gathering did and you want one clean number to answer with. Order Detail Report lists every order along with the buyer's information and, wherever you collected them, their answers to your attendee questions; this is the report to open when a specific buyer emails you about their ticket, or when you need to reconcile one purchase rather than a whole event. Ticket Sales by Date breaks sales into daily, weekly or monthly periods, with quantity, gross, fees, taxes, discounts, refunds, tips and net for each — this is the one that shows you the shape of a launch: the day the announcement went out and sales spiked, and the quiet stretch afterward where nothing moved.

Gross revenue is your ticket subtotal plus any event-level custom fee you configured. It never includes the platform fee or the payment processing fee, and a discount never lowers it — gross is measuring the ticket itself, not what actually landed in your pocket. Net is the number that reflects who is actually paying the fees on your event, a setting you choose per event. If you set it so the buyer pays the service fee, your net is gross minus any discounts, because the buyer already covered the platform and processing fees on top of the ticket price. If you absorb the fees instead, your net is gross minus the platform fee, minus the processing fee, minus any discounts — same ticket, smaller number, because the cost came out of your side instead of the buyer's. Refunds are kept outside both figures rather than quietly subtracted, so you see net revenue and net revenue after refunds side by side, and a single large refund can't disguise how a launch actually went.

The Payouts page picks up once a sale has already happened, and answers a different question than Reports: not what did I sell, but where is the money right now. It reads your connected Stripe account directly and shows the balance still settling next to the balance that's already available, along with the history of payouts already sent to your bank — the same distinction that explains why a strong revenue report and a quiet bank account can both be true at once. The same page also carries the two ways you can earn through other people's events on BrightStar: affiliate commissions, which is what you owe a promoter who sold tickets on your behalf, and ambassador earnings, your share of BrightStar's platform fee on organizers you referred. Each is broken into pending, available and already paid, and each currency is kept separate rather than converted into one blended total — a Canadian event and a European event are never averaged into a figure that matches neither one. Each program and currency also has its own minimum payout amount, so a small balance sits and accumulates instead of triggering a payout that would cost more to send than it's worth.