I Use Toast Payroll - Ask Me Anything!

[acurley17]

Hello Toast Community! My name is Alex Curley and I am the Chief Operating Officer at Palacios Murphy, a multi concept restaurant and hotel hospitality group based out of Houston Texas.

I have been in restaurants for around 30 years and have worked for groups big and small all over the globe. During this time I have used just about every payroll solution out there, from crazy copy and paste "what if" saturated excel sheets, to pen and paper, to the massive corporate monstrosities.

I have been with Toast Payroll for a little over a year now and find it to be the most fluid, operationally sound, guest and employee centric, cost effective and cost saving, flexible payroll solution out there. It restores our teams to sanity and gives us  lost time and energy back so we are able to focus it on what is really important : the guests.

I would love to share any ways that Toast Payroll has been a game changer for us, answer any specific questions you may have, or just talk shop. I never sleep, and love to engage the restaurant community so please, ASK ME ANYTHING!

For the next 30 days or so I will be actively monitoring any responses so please reach out anytime!

[KellyLynn01]

Hi, Alex, thanks so much for the introduction and for presenting this important Ask Me Anything about Toast Payroll!

I'm glad you're here all month, because I am looking for a more efficient way to redistribute employee tips on Toast Payroll. While working as teams or simply switching shifts, employees often tip each other out.

A scenario that occurs daily is the incoming night shift takes over tables from the outgoing day shift, then leaves them part or all of a tip from a shared table. The employees log this in a tip out sheet for me, and I adjust the tips in bi-weekly payroll.

My question is, is there a way for employees to enter tip outs to other employees directly in the system that would integrate with payroll?

This would be such a game changer/time saver for me and my staff!

Thank you so much for looking into this for me - I'm looking forward to hearing your expert opinion! 

[acurley17]

Hello Kelly!

Thanks a lot for reaching out. I feel your pain, lol. I have been there with the excel tip sheet madness. Not only such a drawn out process reentering all the daily data once into the sheet and then again into a payroll system, though also prone to disaster. One formula off, one name off, a deleted cell, and then payroll is a mess and you are dealing with emails, texts, retro pay, and then starting it all over again!

I think one of the coolest things about Toast Payroll is the Tip Manager. To be able to take all of this out of managers hands and put it in a safe, secure, and foolproof place where the data is tried and true, and not prone to any human error is a game changer. Also removed the HR nightmares which can come along with managers paws constantly in the employees cookie jar per se!

So as you may or may not know (I am not sure if you are already using Toast Payroll), the tip manager replaces and and all tip sheets because it allows you to create rules that determine when and where tips go and how they are distributed. These rules are highly customizable. For instance you can create a rule where an Event Server 1 pools with a Catering Server 1, and then tips 1% of food sales to runner, 2% of beverage sales to a bartender, then pools remaing tips and the distributes it by points. I know that is a little dramatic, most people stick to basic rules, though just highlights how deep you can go.

We have quite a bit of rules in some of our restaurants where we have lots of jobs. We use multiple layers of event servers, we have catering services, we have taco trucks, cocktail servers, you name it. What happens to all of thier tips is determined to a rule we created that is associated with thier job type.

If you wanted to handle this outside of payroll, then I would say you would just transfer the table from the AM server over to the PM server and call it a day. If you want Toast Payroll to handle it, the approach that I would probobaly take would be to create an AM server job code and a PM server job code and then create a rule that specifically applies to those job codes which supports your distribution goal. In this case they can be clocked in normally during the shift, and if they decide to due this switacharoo per se, you can just edit thier job in the time entry management and the rule would be applied.

Hope this helps!

Thanks,

Alex Curley

COO Palacios Murphy

[ashokr]

Hi Alex, 

Thank you for taking the time to contribute back to the community. I'm not a Toast Payroll user since we have some special requirements that my accountant is able to fulfill, and they use QuickBooks instead. 

Just like Indian cooking recipes, our needs are just as complex 🙂 LOL

My need is that sometimes we have folks who are paid at different times. 

1. Paid weekly (But paydays are Sunday->Saturday for each week
2. Paid twice a month, on  the  1st and 15th of each month
3. Some paid a fixed net pay amount. Say Paycheck (net) is $400 every other week.
4. Some clock in and out, but they are just paid a fixed amount every month. I'm worried it might add overtime when it isn't required. But I want them to clock in and out for security and certain other things I depend on to work correctly.

Any thoughts on this from Toast Payroll Users? 

I'm not sure if Toast Payroll allows you to do different things.  

[acurley17]

Hello Ashok,

Very nice to meet you and thank you very much for your question.

One of the things that I like about Toast Payroll is that when it comes to wage and hour compliance, which is a very tricky business, it handles most of the "complex" items that can sometimes trip up operators. Cross company overtime, wage garnishes, W2s, onboarding documents, salaried vs hourly vs W9, consistent tip policy etc. etc. are all items that if done incorrectly can bring a lot of liability issues to us operators when we have enough to worry about. Toast Payroll has solutions for all of these and I like that because I have more important things to worry about!

The reason I bring that up is because some of the scenarios that you bring up may not be 100% applicable though not because software couldn't do it, though rather because you may not want it to. Fixed rates aren't exempt from overtime for instance, and paying someone a weekly wage under the FLSA salary threshould also doesn't exempt you from overtime. As a result, these are things some operators would want to ensure their software prevents them from doing rather than doing 😉

Generally "fixed" weekly employees would all be salary employees. Anyone who is variable, you definitley want clocking in. Anyone not clocking in and not salaried would most likely be a W9 "employee" or contractor. Of course, Toast Payroll can account for all those scenarios.

Though we generally use the standard pay cycle, you can set your payroll calendar and check frequency however you like in Toast Payroll.  You can also run off cycle payrolls which are customizable which would satisfy some of the arrangements which get beyond the standard.

In terms of accounting software, the GL reporting in Toast Payroll is very clean and I wouldn't expect any issues integrating with your current accounting software. We used to use QB as well so I am familiar with what that looks like on the back end.

Hope this helps!

Thanks,

Alex

[Tradewinds]

What General Accounting software works best with Toast? Like QuickBooks or something similar.