Tip Jar Cash Tips

[nbunda]

Hey everyone, looking for some help with something I've never really tackled before - Cash tips.

Currently, every week, for non-cash tips, we have an in-house tip aggregator that pulls the Payments report and the Time Entries report from Toast and calculates everyone's earnings based on hours worked during each shift. They are pooled per shift and distributed evenly to the staff through payroll (we do not use Toast Tips Manager or Toast Payroll).

We are looking for the best way to start distributing tip jar cash through payroll just like we do our non-cash tips. Ideally for our setup, the manager empties the jar, counts up the tips, and deposits that amount along with the rest of our cash deposit for that shift, then there is some report that shows that entered amount and the time it was entered, which I can add to our non-cash tip pool when we calculate our distributions for the pay period.

A few key points:

• We do not currently have shift review required for any employees, but would be interested in seeing how that might make this work, even if just the shift manager does it.
• Everyone uses a shared login for taking orders (a "Default Cashier"). Their own POS code is only used for time clock or approval/manager purposes. So most of our non-cash tips come in as one of these default cashiers. We do not currently clock-in the default cashier. Is there some permission we could give to the default cashier job?
• Our tip aggregator currently uses the payments report to filter and pull authorized/captured non-cash tips for eligible orders, but that wouldn't work for tip jar tips, so we'd need some way to get the cash tip data, depending on how it is entered. Ideally, a downloadable csv, but that's not necessarily a requirement. One requirement would definitely be not having to cycle between locations and then days/shifts individually.
• We could also just do "cash in" on a drawer and entering a note for shift 1 vs shift 2, etc., but I'm not sure if there's a clean enough report that our payroll admin could look at? Surprisingly I'm still not convinced I've seen every report Toast has to offer.

I was toying with the idea of having the shift manager do a shift review before clocking out, and declaring all tip jar tips in their name, then our payroll admin using the "Shifts" report to find the totals for cash tips declared, using the manager's out time to determine which shift those tips were for. But I think we would run into an issue with managers working a long day and declaring twice.

Just looking for any and all ideas/suggestions, or help with adjusting my logic. If anyone else does anything similar I'd love to hear it. Or if any of my ideas are partially doable but involve some additional manual labor, I'm open to hearing that too.

Thanks Toasties!

[nbunda]

UPDATE: I think I have a solution that works for me, but I'm still interested to see what other people are doing!

I decided to use ghost Tip Jar employees for each shift. So Shift 1 Tip Jar has its own employee, Shift 2 Tip Jar has its own employee. At the end of the shift, the manager would count the tip jar, clock in to the ghost employee, do a shift review declaring cash tips, then clock out of the ghost employee and do a Cash In on the drawer for that amount.

This works well because cash tips declared appears in the Time Entries report I am already using! A few additional excel columns and I'm where I need to be!

Is my logic correct for doing a Cash In after declaring cash tips, so that our drawers aren't always up that tip jar amount?

[rcmck]

Was going to suggest using declare cash tips in the shift review, is it necessary though to create the extra ghost employees though, could you simplify and just use the default cashier you already have? I think cash in the correct, can't think of another way to get it into the drawer and deposit. 

[HearthpizzeriaB]

I would agree with you. I think it would be best to just declare it on the shift review for the default cashier.

[nbunda]

Thank you both for your replies! My thinking was that if we have 2 "shifts" with separate tip pools, and the same ghost employee is declaring cash for both shifts, then the report would have no clearly identifying separation between the two shifts, so having a shift 1 and shift 2 employee would resolve that.

Long story short it's just easier for my excel macro to find the words "Shift 1" and "Shift 2" than to determine the shift based on the time it was entered, and it helps avoid any issues if the manager enters the tips late or something.