Tip pooling calculator for restaurants

Five ways to split, in plain words

• Keep your own: every tipped employee keeps what they earned. SafeShift records the declarations and passes them to payroll.
• Paid nightly: tips were handed out in cash at close; SafeShift records the amounts for the pay stub and tax reporting, and never deducts them again.
• Pool everything: all tips for the day go into one pool, split by hours worked, or by role points times hours when some roles earn more per hour of the pool.
• Earners share a percentage: servers and bartenders keep most of their own tips and share a set percentage, either with the whole support team by hours, or as named tip-outs to specific roles such as bussers and runners.
• Custom weights: a fixed percentage per employee, renormalized to whoever worked that day.

A worked example: one Friday night, pooled by hours

With role points, a bartender at 1.5 points and a busser at 0.5 would weight the same hours differently. With a 20 percent tip-out, the servers and bartender would keep 80 percent of their own declared tips and the 20 percent would go to the busser. SafeShift previews any policy against the last pay period before you switch, so you can see every person's number change before it takes effect.

The rules the calculator will not break

• Managers never receive from a pool or a tip-out. Anyone with a manager login or an owner role is excluded at save time and at run time (California Labor Code §351 and the federal FLSA). Working managers keep tips they personally earned, minus their own tip-outs.
• No credit-card fee deductions from tips.
• A day with tips but nobody eligible is a hard stop, not a silent zero: the money is preserved and flagged.
• Every policy version is kept forever and can never be backdated, so any past period re-prices under the policy that was in force, not today's.

Tip credit, for the states that use it

In Florida, Texas, Georgia, and Idaho an employer may count part of an employee's tips toward the minimum wage and pay a lower cash wage, as long as tips bring the employee up to the full minimum for the workweek. SafeShift applies each state's figures, computes the shortfall from declared tips and hours, and adds a tip-credit top-up line to payroll when tips fell short, so the credit is never taken on a week it was not earned. California does not allow a tip credit, and SafeShift never applies one there.

Where the tips come from

Employees declare cash tips at clock-out on the kiosk or their phone; card tips arrive from Toast, Square, or Clover with the time entries, or are entered per period on the manual tip sheet when a POS report has to be reconciled. Each pay period, the tip sheet shows what was collected, who worked, and the split, and it exports with the payroll-ready reports. Every revision of a sheet is kept.

Common questions

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