Get Paid Directly to Your Bank

When someone buys a ticket to your kirtan night, your retreat, or your festival weekend, that money needs to land somewhere real — not sit in a shared pool waiting for BrightStar to release it on a schedule of its own. BrightStar does not hold your money. You connect a Stripe account that belongs to you, and ticket revenue moves to that account as orders complete. You set this connection up once, from Dashboard, Payouts, and it carries across every event you run afterward — you are not reconnecting for each retreat, each door, or each new listing.

Stripe's onboarding form is different for every country, and the differences aren't cosmetic — a Canadian bank account and a Canadian phone number will not pass through a form built for the United States. BrightStar resolves the country for your Stripe Express account from the value you supply, and if you don't supply one, from the country your request arrives from. It does not default everyone to the United States, which matters if you're organizing from outside it. If you happen to be traveling when you first set up payouts, pass your real country rather than the one you're currently standing in — the form you get needs to match the bank account and identity documents you actually hold, or Stripe will reject them.

Your Stripe connection sits in one of three states, and each one tells you exactly what to do next.

Not connected means no Stripe account exists for you yet — you haven't clicked connect, or you haven't finished Stripe's form. Paid events cannot be published in this state.

Pending means the account exists, but Stripe hasn't finished verifying it, or charges aren't enabled yet. This is normal and usually temporary — anywhere from a few minutes to a few days, depending on what Stripe is still asking for. The fix is simply to reopen the onboarding link and complete whatever Stripe is waiting on.

Connected means Stripe has confirmed onboarding is complete and charges are enabled. At this point paid events can be published and money can actually move.

BrightStar checks your Stripe status at publish time, on both the events list and the event manage page, and it will not let a paid event go live until payouts are connected. This isn't an arbitrary hurdle — it exists so an event never starts selling tickets into an account that has nowhere to send the proceeds. Picture a door opening for a sound-healing evening with online sales already running, and no bank account behind any of it: that's the situation this check prevents. Free events skip this entirely, since there's no money to route anywhere in the first place.

Each completed order records the amount owed to you, and once it's been sent along, the Stripe transfer that carried it. Before that transfer settles, BrightStar keeps a running pending balance built from your completed orders — gross revenue, platform fees, processing fees, and the net you're actually owed, plus how many orders and events that balance covers. That's what the Payouts page shows you before anything has reached your bank.

From your connected Stripe account, Stripe pays out to your bank on Stripe's own schedule — the Payouts page notes this is typically two to seven business days, timing set by Stripe and your bank rather than by BrightStar. Once a payout has gone out, it appears in your payout history with its own gross, fees, net, status, and the number of events it covered — plus a failure reason if something went wrong.