Fundraiser Profit Calculator: What Each Event Actually Kept
Enter what each fundraiser brought in, what it cost, and how many volunteer hours it took. Get what the group actually kept per event — in total, per volunteer hour, and per family — and which events are worth running again.
Free · no signup · runs in your browser — nothing you type leaves your device.
Events
One row per fundraiser this year. Sample figures are filled in — replace them with yours. Leave "families" blank if you don't track it.
What the year actually kept
- Net kept
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- Gross raised
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- Costs
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- % of gross kept
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- Volunteer hours, total
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- Net per volunteer hour
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Event by event
Keep it, don't recalculate it
Track this all year with PTA Treasurer OS
PTA Treasurer OS logs every event, reimbursement and cash count as it happens, tracks who's owed and whose check needed a second signature, and builds the monthly treasurer's report in one click — so this table updates itself instead of getting rebuilt in a spreadsheet after every fundraiser. One offline file, no subscription, yours forever — one-time $26.
How the calculator works
Three numbers per event, two totals, and one comparison against your own bar.
- Net for each event = gross raised − costs. The fall fun run in the sample: $12,480 gross − $2,130 costs = $10,350 net.
- Net per volunteer hour = net ÷ hours — the number that actually ranks events, because it is not distorted by how big the event was. The fun run nets $10,350 over 150 hours = $69.00/hour; the book fair nets $1,240 over 62 hours = $20.00/hour. The book fair raised more in gross than several other events but kept far less per hour worked.
- Per family = net ÷ families participating, when you track that — useful for seeing which events are worth the ask relative to how many households showed up.
- Each event is banded against your bar: net below $0 is "lost money," net per hour under the bar is "under your bar," and at or above it is "worth it." In the sample at a $40/hour bar, the fun run, spirit wear sale and restaurant night clear it, the book fair ($20/hour) falls under it, and the fall festival nets −$420 — it lost money outright.
- The totals are simple sums: $25,770 gross − $13,220 costs = $12,550 kept, over 339 volunteer hours = $37.02 kept per hour across the whole year.
What it deliberately leaves out
This calculator does not track who was reimbursed, whether a check needed a second signature, or whether a cash count matched the deposit — those are cash-control questions, not profit questions, and guessing at them here would be worse than leaving them out. It also does not know your organization's own policy on what counts as a fundraiser cost versus an operating cost; if your board draws that line differently, follow your board's definition and adjust the costs you enter accordingly.
Reading "worth it" correctly
"Worth it" and "under your bar" are not verdicts on the event's purpose — a fall festival can be worth running again for turnout and goodwill even if it lost money, and that's a call for your board, not this page. The calculator only tells you what the event kept per hour of volunteer time, so the conversation about whether to run it again starts from a real number instead of a guess.
Questions
- What counts as "costs" for a fundraiser?
- Whatever you actually paid to run the event — vendor fees, supplies, rentals, printing, and anything else that came out before the group kept the rest. Leave out your own board’s unpaid time; that’s what the volunteer-hours field is for.
- Why measure net per volunteer hour instead of just the total raised?
- Because the biggest check isn’t always the best use of people. An event that nets less money but takes far fewer hours can be worth repeating over one that brings in more but eats a whole season of planning — the per-hour number is what actually tells the two apart.
- What’s "your bar" and how do I pick it?
- It’s the $-per-hour result your own board considers worth the volunteer time. There’s no outside standard for this — set it at whatever number your group would actually use to decide "do this again" versus "skip it next year," and change it any time that changes.
- An event hasn’t happened yet — how do I handle it?
- Leave it out of the calculator until it has real numbers. An event with zero gross and zero hours isn’t "break even," it’s just missing data, and including it would understate every rate you’re measuring.
- Does anything I type get saved or sent anywhere?
- No. The calculator runs entirely in your browser and stores nothing. Close the tab and it is gone.
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