Square vs Venmo vs Cash Box: Getting Paid at Shows

The real fee math behind Square, Venmo, and a cash box at a weekend show, plus what your tax preparer will actually want to see.

A bowl doesn't care how it gets paid for. You should. Three ways to take money at a weekend show cost three different amounts, carry three different kinds of risk, and — this is the part most comparisons skip — leave three very different trails for the person who does your taxes. The fee percentage is the number everyone argues about. It's not the one that should decide this.

The three-way math, on one bowl

Say you sell a 10-inch maple bowl for $180 at a Saturday show. Here's what actually lands in your pocket depending on how the customer pays, using current published rates:

Cash wins on that table every time, which is exactly why it's tempting to run a whole show on it. It's also why cash is the method most likely to quietly go missing from your books — more on that below.

Notice Venmo's QR option undercuts Square by about a dollar and a half on this sale, while Venmo's Tap to Pay is actually the most expensive of the three digital options. The rate isn't fixed by which app is on your phone — it's fixed by which button the customer's payment goes through, and that's worth knowing before you assume "Venmo" always means cheap.

What a whole weekend actually costs in fees

One bowl is a tidy example. A show is messier. Say a two-day weekend nets $1,850 across fourteen sales — bowls, a few turned pens, a couple of platters — and $740 of it lands as cash, with the remaining $1,110 across nine transactions run through Square:

• Card fees: $1,110 × 2.6% = $28.86, plus 9 × $0.15 = $1.35 → $30.21 total
• Cash: $740, no fee
• Total fees on the weekend: $30.21, or about 1.6% of gross

Run that same $1,110 through Venmo Tap to Pay instead and the fee comes to $33.00 — slightly worse. Run it through Venmo's QR link and it drops to $21.99 — genuinely cheaper than Square, if your customers are willing to pull out their phone and scan instead of tapping a card, which at a craft show is real friction. Some buyers won't bother, and a lost sale costs a lot more than a fee ever does. The cheapest option on a spreadsheet isn't automatically the cheapest option in practice.

Commissions and deposits are a different transaction

None of the table above covers the commission that comes in over the phone or through a message — someone who saw your bowls at last month's show and wants a matching set, paying a deposit before you've turned a single blank. Keyed-in card payments, where you type the card number instead of tapping it, run at a noticeably steeper rate than a card present at your booth — commonly quoted around 3.5% plus 15 cents per transaction, well above the in-person rate on the same processor. On a $300 deposit, that's the difference between a $7.95 fee and something closer to $10.65 for the exact same money, just because the customer wasn't standing at your table.

The fix is simple once you know to look for it: send a payment link or invoice instead of keying the card by hand, and most processors route it at the lower online rate rather than the keyed-in one. It's a small difference on one deposit. Across a season of commissions, it adds up to real money left on the table for no reason other than habit.

The 1099-K myth that's still spooking people

Here's a piece of relief worth having straight: under the One Big Beautiful Bill Act signed in 2025, the federal 1099-K reporting threshold for 2026 reverted to $20,000 and 200 transactions a year. That's a long way from where the rumor mill parked it a few years back, when everyone braced for a form at $600. Unless you're running a genuinely large operation through Square or Venmo, you likely won't get a 1099-K from either platform this year.

That's not a green light to skip recording the income, though — and this is where the myth does actual damage. The threshold only controls when the platform has to tell the IRS. It has never controlled whether the income is taxable. A show that nets $175 in your Venmo balance is $175 of business income the year you earned it, form or no form. Talk to a tax preparer about how they want that income organized before it ever becomes an issue — that's a conversation worth having once, not a rule to memorize.

Cash needs a record more than either app does

Square and Venmo write their own paper trail. Every swipe, tap, and QR scan lands in an app with a timestamp and an amount, whether you ever look at it again or not. A cash box does none of that. The only record a cash sale leaves is the one you make yourself, and on a good Saturday with a line at the table, that's exactly the record that doesn't get made.

The fix isn't complicated — it's the same count-back method turners already use for load-out. Log what you brought (say, 22 pieces to the table) and what comes home (6). Sixteen sold. Cross that against your cash box total and your card total, and the gap between "what should be there" and "what is there" tells you whether the count or the drawer is off, while the show is still fresh enough to remember why. Skip the count-back and a cash-heavy weekend becomes a number you're guessing at come tax season — which is a worse position than any processing fee puts you in.

Sales tax follows you to the show

One more thing that catches turners off guard the first time they leave their home state for a show: setting up a booth for even a single weekend can be enough physical presence to create a sales tax collection obligation in that state, separate from wherever your shop is registered. States handle it differently — some expect every vendor to collect regardless of how briefly they're there, and a few have the show organizer collect and remit on vendors' behalf instead. The organizer of the show you're attending has usually already worked this out for their event and dealt with the same question from a hundred vendors before you; asking them directly is faster than guessing, and confirming the specifics with your tax preparer is worth doing before the season gets busy, not after.

The stance

Fee percentage is real money and worth knowing. But it's the least important number on this page. What actually decides which payment method belongs at your table is whether the sale leaves a record that survives, unchanged, to the person doing your year-end paperwork. Cash that's counted back and logged the same day is fine. Cash that's "in there somewhere, I'll add it up later" is a liability wearing the shape of savings. Card fees you can see on a receipt. The gap in a cash box you can't always find.

This is the kind of bookkeeping that MadeKeeper builds around rather than bolts on — see what MadeKeeper tracks for woodturners: blanks and rough-outs as real inventory, count-back reconciliation for a show weekend, and every sale landing in one ledger no matter which of the three ways above the customer paid.

Free during the founding pilot — the app is there to try on your next weekend's numbers, whichever drawer or app they came in through.