Why track any of this?
You already work the games. The money either shows up or it doesn't. So why keep records?
Because you're running a small business, whether you meant to or not. Every game fee is self-employment income. The IRS's cut of it runs roughly 15% self-employment tax plus your income-tax bracket — unless you document the other side of the ledger: what it cost you to earn it.
The 1099 changed the game
It used to be that each school paid you directly, few of them crossed the $600 reporting threshold, and most officiating income lived in a gray area. As chapters consolidate pay through platforms like ArbiterPay, your whole year now lands on one 1099 with your name on it. That income was always reportable — but now it's visible, and filing without your deductions means paying tax on money you never really kept.
What officials leave on the table
For a typical active official working ~60 games a season:
| --- | --- |
| Game income | ~$6,000 |
| Mileage deduction (~60 mi round trip per game at the IRS rate) | ~$2,500 |
| Dues, camps, uniforms, gear, clinics | ~$800 |
That's over $3,000 of deductions — roughly a thousand dollars of actual tax — that exists only if it's documented: dates, miles, purposes, receipts. A shoebox doesn't survive an audit. A contemporaneous log does.
RefTraq's job is making that log a side effect of the officiating you already do: your schedule syncs in, fees attach themselves, mileage prefills from venues you've driven to before, and at tax time the Schedule C export is a download, not a weekend.
RefTraq provides record-keeping, not tax advice. The numbers above are illustrative — your CPA has the final word, and the app is built to hand them clean records.