Tip Pool Setup

What are Tip Pools?

Tip Pools allow restaurant staff to pool and disburse tips across staff. This method, instead of the old school tip out process, has become the prefered tipping structure for most restaurants. Since servers and bartenders are the ones generating sales and collecting tips, this gives them a clear path on how much they should be tipping to the support staff helping them.

Focus POS can calculate and report tip pooling based on the percentage of sales by each report group. Multiple jobs can contribute and be dispersed to the employees working in the specified distribution job.

During this walkthrough, we will be using a couple different terms you will want to be familiar with.

Distribution Job - The job group receiving a tip distribution. Any employees clocked in with this job when a distribution is active will receive a portion of the contributed tips.

Contribution Job - The job group contributing or pooling the tips. Any employees clocked in with this job will be giving tips to those clocked into a distribution job.

Report Groups - The individual sales categories configured in FOCUS to track sales.

Before Tip Pools can be viewed on reports, you must configure the tip pool distributions within FOCUS. Follow the steps below or watch our YouTube video on Tip Pool Setup & Reports.

Tip Pool Setup

1. Access FOCUS Setup as a Manager, Owner or other Job with Location access rights.
2. Navigate to Reports > Tip Pools. The Tip Pools Setup area will appear.
3. Select a blank spot from the Tip Pools list on the far left side.
4. Name the Tip Pool distribution, this is commonly the name of the job group the tips will be going to along with shift if distributions are different for lunch vs. dinner.
5. On the far right side, enter the applicable percentages that will be used for calculating the tip disbursement. You can set up to four (4) different rates which can be used for different contributing jobs and report groups.
6. If necessary you can specify an Active Time. This allows this tip pool distribution to only occur for a specific time of day. The Active Time uses Time Ranges which can be set up in Miscellaneous > Time Ranges.
7. You may use the Maximum field to restrict the maximum dollar ($) amount a Contribution Job will pay into the tip pool.
8. Next, you can select a Contribution Job under the Jobs column and set the rate number to be used for each Report Group. This allows different rates to be used for different groups of menu items as well as different rates for each Contribution Job. Repeat this step for each job that needs to contribute to the Distribution Job for this pool.
9. Repeat steps for each Distribution Job you need to pool tips for.

Once Tip Pools are configured you may now set up and view reports for Tip Pools.