Choosing Numbers and Saving Them to a Ticket with Add to Ticket
LottoBase Team 19 October 2026 4 min read
Scanning a paper ticket brings numbers you have already played into LottoBase. This post covers the other direction: choosing numbers in the app, saving them with Add to Ticket, and turning the result into a ticket you can buy from and then hand over to the app to check.
Lines and tickets
Two words are worth pinning down first. A line is one set of numbers — for Lotto, six numbers from the 59 in the pool. A ticket is what you buy: one or more lines for one game, entered into one or more draws. A play slip at a newsagent works the same way; each row of boxes you fill in is a line, and the whole slip becomes one ticket.
LottoBase mirrors that. You cannot buy National Lottery tickets through the app — only at a retailer or on national-lottery.co.uk — so a ticket built in LottoBase starts life as a draft: a list of lines you intend to play. Once you have bought them for real, you tell the app, and it takes over the checking.
Step one: choose your line
Select a game from the Games tab and you land on the Numbers tab for that game, titled “Your Numbers”. A random set of numbers is already waiting at the top. These are your selected numbers, and there are three ways to shape them:
- Random Pick replaces them with a fresh random set.
- Tap a number to open the Number Picker and choose a specific replacement. In its default Essentials view, tapping a ball selects it straight away; in its Insights view, tapping a ball shows its history first, and Confirm Selection applies it. The Essentials view also holds your Favourites — long-press any ball there to save it — which is handy if your line includes a birthday or a house number you always play.
- Long-press a number on the Numbers tab to lock it. The next Random Pick reshuffles everything else and leaves the locked number alone.
Locking is what makes the last two work together. Set the two or three numbers that matter to you, lock them, and let Random Pick fill the rest as many times as you like.
If you are curious what past draws make of the line, switch to the Insights view before saving. None of it alters the odds — every line has the same chance in the next draw — but it shows the history behind a line before you commit to it.
Step two: tap Add to Ticket
When the line looks right, tap Add to Ticket. What happens next depends on what is already in your Tickets tab:
- If you have no untracked ticket for that game, LottoBase creates a new ticket with this line on it.
- If you do have one or more untracked tickets for the game, a panel lists them. Choose one to add the line to it, or choose Create New Ticket to start a separate one.
Add to Ticket saves your selected numbers to an existing untracked ticket or a brand-new one.
The choice is about how you intend to buy. Five lines going on one slip belong on one ticket; selections you buy separately belong on separate tickets.
Step three: build and review the draft
Repeat step one and step two for each line you want. Then open the Tickets tab to see the result. A newly created ticket is Not Tracking, and that is deliberate: a draft has to stay editable so you can keep adding lines without anything being fixed in place.
While a ticket is Not Tracking, the three dots next to any line open the Edit Line screen, where you can change its numbers, delete the line, or view its Insights. The ticket card’s Edit button opens the Edit Ticket screen, where the ticket name is editable — worth doing if you keep more than one draft.
Step four: buy it, then track it
Use the lines to fill in a play slip at a retailer, or enter them on the relevant game’s online play slip at national-lottery.co.uk. Then return to LottoBase, open the ticket from the Tickets tab, tap Edit, and choose Track this Ticket.
From that point the ticket behaves like a scanned one. The app checks it against each draw it is entered in, records any wins, counts down the draws left and watches for expiry. Its numbers can no longer be changed — they now describe something you have actually bought — though you can still view each line’s Insights from the three dots.
This last step is the one most easily forgotten. If you tend to leave drafts sitting, the Purchase Ticket Reminder in Settings > Ticket Reminder Settings will prompt you about untracked tickets, so a line you meant to play does not quietly miss its draw.
The flow in brief
Pick a game, shape the line, tap Add to Ticket, repeat, review on the Tickets tab, buy, then Track this Ticket. The lottery is a game of chance, so settle on what you are comfortable spending before you start building lines rather than after.