Drawer help!

[Buffaloslice]

I need some help. We went live with Toast yesterday, and while I’m really excited about the new system overall, the support we’ve received, especially with menu building and on our go-live day was not what I expected. It was chaotic and stressful, and some of the things the remote specialists told me “aren’t possible” would actually be dealbreakers for how we run our business.

We’re a  busy, fast-paced restaurant with takeout service, delivery (our drivers and door dash), bakery, pizzeria and dining. With three drawers dedicated to takeout and delivery only. Multiple staff use those drawers throughout the day, and both cash and credit card tips are pooled based on hours worked. We also pay out credit card tips in cash directly from the drawer where the tip was processed. Drawers are cashed out after lunch and again after dinner service.

From what I was told, if we want to track by drawer, the drawer itself has to be tied to a number rather than the employee. But that creates another problem: we lose the ability to track orders by employees, which is important when the kitchen has questions or when there’s an issue with an order, among a host of other things.

We also have delivery drivers who cash out of these drawers at night, with multiple drivers rotating during the day. On top of that, we use two dine in service drawers (one at the bar and one in the dining room) that multiple servers share. Another concern is the requirement for drawer level passcodes is that every employee shares the same access, then I need to authorize all drawers as managers, which feels risky?

For take-out tips we pool and distribute them based on hours worked after both the lunch and dinner shifts. Credit card tips are paid out in cash from the same register where the transaction was processed. The same system applies to our waitstaff: they receive cash payouts for their credit card tips directly from the drawer the order was rung through, and then they handle tipping out bussers or other support staff themselves. Drivers also receive their credit card tips in cash from the drawer we cash them out in. Our delivery drivers settle-up and cash out at the end of their scheduled shifts. We have multiple drivers each day with varying schedules, and some shifts overlap with others. Some drivers take a bank for change and some do not, we make note of that when they start their shifts. They do get paid per delivery as well but that goes into their actual paycheck. We do need a way to track how many deliveries they take each week. Our previous systems did this for us. We also need a way to track credit card tips that are paid out to employees during the week... while we pay these out each day they are claimed on their weekly paycheck.

To add to the confusion, I learned yesterday that what one support rep told me was “impossible” with our menu setup, another rep was later able to fix. So, I’m hoping there is a solution here. What we really need is a way to cash out drawers at the end of the day (and after lunch), with multiple people using them, while keeping the drawer itself responsible for tracking cash, credit, and tips, without losing employee-level order tracking.

We’re heading into day two today, and I’d greatly appreciate any suggestions or solutions. We definitely need help.

[rcmck]

It is true that you would need to use a ghost employee to ring all sales under if you want to have multiple people on one drawer without tips being attached to the individual employees. I think you would need to use tips manager to be able to have orders tied to individual employees and make the tips work how you want, but I don't have any personal experience with that, hopefully someone else can chime in. https://central.toasttab.com/s/article/Getting-Started-with-Toast-Tips-Manager-How-to-Pool-Share-Tip...