As restaurants continue to navigate the current labour shortage, the topic of tip culture and tip management is under the spotlight.
Amid the reopening of indoor dining and customers’ desire to support local businesses during the pandemic, restaurant tips increased by a remarkable 18 per cent in 2021 compared with 2019, reports restaurant team management platform 7shifts.
And industry experts have suggested that a reevaluation of the way that operators distribute tips could be a key method of mitigating the continued impacts of the pandemic on foodservice employment.
David Hopkins of consultancy firm The Fifteen Group has said that redistributing tips to not just front-of-house staff but back-of-house and other workers could create more attractive job openings, help employees stay happy and feel supported in their work, and boost bottom-line profit.
Now, 7shifts has launched a new solution designed to help operators and managers streamline the complicated and time-consuming tip tracking and distribution process.
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With Tip Pooling, restaurants can eliminate the burden of weekly tip tracking and the need to spend hours calculating and distributing their teams’ well-deserved tips for payroll.
Designed in close collaboration with 7shifts customers, the platform provides an intuitive workflow to create customizable Tip Pools for restaurant teams with a simple rule-creator that takes less than a minute to configure. Once pools are created, tip data is automatically synced from supported POS integrations, or through 7shifts’ integrated time-clocking app, 7punches. Once collected, tip calculations are then automatically made to reduce costly errors and sent to supported Payroll providers via integration or export.
Tip Pooling has been designed to offer three key benefits to operators and managers:
- Create and customize tip pools with ease
- Save time and effort with automated tip calculations
- Reduce errors by sending tips directly to payroll
“We try to speak directly to as many of our 20,000+ restaurant partners as possible to see how we can help them improve their operating performance. From what we’ve learned, effective tip management has been one of the biggest challenges for restaurant operators,” said Jordan Boesch, CEO and founder of the Saskatoon-founded company. “We developed robust Tip Pooling functionality to meet the needs of restaurants now and into the future, but to also create a solution that helps ensure that restaurant team members are properly compensated for the tips that come from creating the amazing guest experiences restaurants are known for.”
