Tip out restaurant team members
About tipping out team members
Not every restaurant follows the same closing procedures when tipping out team members. If your restaurant accepts optional tipping, there are a few of the common ways restaurants tip out their team at the end of a shift.
Before you begin
If you decide to tip team members directly or use tip pooling, check that each team member has the appropriate tip eligibility settings in their profile. For example, if you don’t want a manager to receive tips, you’ll need to toggle off “Tip eligible” in their team member profile through your Square Dashboard. Learn more about how to set up tip pooling.
Tipping methods rely on information from team members’ shift reports; the ability to run and view shift reports requires a Square for Restaurants Plus or Premium subscription.
Tip out from a cash drawer
First, have your team members run their shift reports to view payment card tips (i.e. Non-Cash Tips) in the Square Restaurant POS.
In the Square Restaurant POS, tap More > Cash Management > Pay In/Out.
Label the payout (Team Member Name) Tips. Payouts will create a record of cash deducted from a drawer, separate from cash sales.
Set up tip pooling
By default, all locations are set to tip team members directly, where each team member keeps 100% of the tips they collect.
If you want to pool tips and equally divide each credit card tip across all tip-eligible team members clocked in at the time of the transaction, follow these steps:
Sign in to Square Dashboard and go to Staff > Settings > Tips.
Choose a location, then click Tip allocation.
Click Team pools tips > Create tip pool.
Choose how often tips are tallied up:
Per transaction
Daily
Weekly
5. Select how you want to split tips, equally or by a fixed percentage.
6. Choose who receives tips based on their role and the percentage assigned to each team member.
7. Choose whether you want to apply tip settings to additional locations, as well as an effective date. The effective date can be up to two weeks in the past.
8. Click Save.
Learn more about how to Run payroll for W-2 employees and how to Run payroll for contractors.