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It doesn’t matter if you are running your Lottery Pool just for fun or for profit, for half a dozen office workmates or hundreds of people all over the world – if you don’t get the basics right you can end up in a whole heap of a mess! In some countries it is not permitted to profit from running a lottery syndicate, so if profit is on your mind, check first.

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It’s a fairly dull first step, but you need some kind of system to know exactly who is in your lottery pool, what numbers you are entering, who chose them, who has paid and for how many weeks. You may even want to log staff holidays if a work lottery syndicate so you know to get money before they disappear for 4 weeks round the world!

One of the simplest methods is just to set up a basic spreadsheet in Excel/Lotus. Just list names down the first column, and draw dates across the first row. Put an ‘X’ or a ’1′ in the cells for the relevant name and draw dates when people pay you. Use a formula to add ‘x’ days to the draw date if, like me, you’re too lazy to keep looking up the dates. It’s a quick, easy, visual way to log who has paid and who hasn’t. You can either hide or just delete columns for old draws to keep it manageable. It is very easy to delete a row for a member who leaves, or add a new row should someone join. You can log the date and amounts in a ‘winnings’ sheet in the same spreadsheet. You may find it useful to log members in the lottery pool at that date against every win – although I’ve found it can be better to log start and leaving dates of all members in another sheet.

Why log members and winnings? – because you’re going to win some small amounts that are just too fiddly to bother splitting and distributing until they accumulate to something bigger. And if someone leaves, you need to know how much they are due, and what remains for everyone else!

This approach is fine for a fairly small lottery pool, but believe me it gets very painful very quickly if numbers grow!

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If you’re pretty handy with Excel/Lotus, you can develop your spreadsheet and formularize your calculation for winning shares, leavers shares, remainders etc. Alternatively, if you don’t find this fun or the number of members is making it painful, trial out some of the many lottery software packages.

The Basics!
Do you have a lottery syndicate agreement in place? If not, do it. The terms should be simple to understand and very clear to all members. You can run into legal problems, tax problems and plain old disputes of who is due what if you neglect an agreement. If the big win happens for you, you don’t want to give a large chunk of it to a lawyer because Bob says he is still a member when everyone else says he hasn’t paid for 6 weeks… You should set out at least what game you are playing, the frequency, what happens with winnings – small and large, who is responsible for checking results and claiming winnings, what happens if a member has not paid – are their numbers entered, do they receive a share etc.

Ideally you shouldn’t have any non-payers because members should come to you to pay. But you know you’re going to be involved in chasing people up sometimes. You may want to specify from the start that everyone pays a month in advance for example to minimise your leg work. If it’s a work lottery pool you might want to time things for pay day! So get your Lottery Pool started today.