A tip pool is a way to distribute tips to other staff members besides servers. Since bartenders and bussers are part of hospitality staff, a restaurant might want servers to share a portion of their tips with the other staff members.

There are several different ways to set up a “tip pool”. This will show how to set up a simple tip pool with these characteristics:

• Shows up on a server cashout report
• Shows a percentage of all sales, or a percentage of only certain sales categories
• May or may not automatically deduct from “cash to remit”

First, set up the flash category you want this tip pool to be calculated from. If this tip pool is for paying bartenders, then you might need a flash category that includes liquor, beer, and wine sales. This setting is in Setup → Reports → Flash Reports. Create a single flash category that contains the sales you want to calculate from. In this example, we are going to calculate only from beer.

• We created flash category #3, “BEER”
• Beer is major category 3, so we added “00003” to this flash category
• If we wanted to include liquor or wine, we might also add “00002” (major category 2) or “00005” (major category 5)

Next, set up your tip pools. This is in Setup → Payment → Tips → Tip Pool Percent. You can have up to three tip pools.

• If this tip pool should calculate from just a single flash category, then enter it for “Flash Category”
• If this tip pool should calculate from total sales, then flag “Include Total Sales?”
• If this tip pool should include sales tax, flag “Include Sales Tax?”
• If you want the servers to remit cash first then pay out their tip pool separately, then flag “Tip pool not added to cash to remit”. If you want the tip pool to be mandatory and be paid using the servers’ remitted cash, then do not flag this.

That’s it! Ring in some sales and test it out. Below is an example cashout showing how these three tip pools calculated.