Built because the spreadsheet always breaks

Where it came from

We kept meeting the same person. They run a Lotto syndicate — at work, at the club, among family — and they are the one who buys the ticket, chases the contributions, remembers who joined in March and who quietly stopped paying in June, works out what a $100 win is split eleven ways, and tells everybody the outcome.

They do all of it in a spreadsheet, or a notebook, or their head. It is genuinely difficult. Money comes in at different times and in different amounts. Members join and leave mid-run. A ticket cost has to be divided among whoever was actually in that week, not whoever is in now. Every one of those is a small sum, and the small sums are exactly where an honest mistake hides.

The people doing this are not accountants. They are doing a favour. And the reward for the favour is that when anything is unclear, they are the one who has to explain it.

The second reason: transparency

The other half of the problem is not arithmetic at all. It is that a syndicate asks every member to trust one person — with their money, and with their word about a ticket most of them will never see.

Usually that trust is entirely well placed. The difficulty is that it is rarely demonstrated. There is no record the members can see. There is just the organiser, saying how it went.

And when that arrangement fails, it fails expensively. There have been well-publicised cases in several countries in which the person running a syndicate ended up in court, accused of not declaring a winning ticket and claiming the prize as their own. Others have gone the opposite way: members suing an organiser over a win they said was the syndicate’s, and losing — because nobody could produce evidence of who was in the pool or what had been agreed.

Read either way round, the lesson is the same. An organiser with a complete, timestamped, member-visible trail is protected. An organiser without one is exposed —even when they have done nothing wrong at all. That is worth saying twice, because it is the part people miss: good records are not a defence against dishonest organisers so much as a defence for honest ones.

We wrote about several of those cases, and what they turned on, in our articles.

What we built

A record that is kept as a by-product of running the syndicate normally, rather than as a separate chore nobody has time for.

If the same numbers play every draw, the syndicate uploads that ticket once and the draws are generated from it; where a different ticket is played, the organiser adds that draw. Either way the ticket cost is split and charged automatically. Wins are divided evenly and credited. Every movement lands in an append-only ledger with a reason and a name attached, which means corrections are new entries rather than quiet overwrites. And each member is emailed when they go into a draw and again when the result is in, so the record is not something they have to ask to see — it arrives.

Members never log in. There are no accounts for them to forget the password to. Only the person running the syndicate signs in, and the app spends the rest of its time keeping everybody else informed.

Who we are

Lighthouse IT builds and looks after software and websites for small New Zealand businesses, from Cape Foulwind near Westport. We wrote this app for a real syndicate before we offered it to anyone else, and it is still run the way small, long-lived software should be: plain, maintained, and answerable to a person you can email.