Terms & conditions

Last updated 3 August 2026

These terms govern use of the Tip Tip Hooray! platform. Different sections apply to different people, so each one says who it is talking to.

1. What this service is

Tip Tip Hooray! is a tipping management platform. Guests use it to leave gratuity without cash; venues use it to collect and distribute that gratuity; earners use it to receive it. We provide the software and coordinate the payment rails.

We are not a bank. We are not a money transmitter acting on our own account, and we do not hold deposits. Card charges and ACH transfers are executed by licensed payment providers under their own terms, which you also agree to when you onboard.

2. Who owns a tip

A tip belongs to the person or people it was given to. It is not our money and it is not the venue's operating revenue. Three consequences follow.

• We deduct only the fees disclosed to you, and never more.
• A venue may configure how gratuity is distributed, but may not divert it to itself beyond a disclosed back-of-house pool.
• Applicable wage-and-hour law governs who may share in a tip pool. Configuring a pool that violates that law is the venue's responsibility, not ours — see section 6.

3. Fees

Fees are deducted from gratuity, never invoiced to a venue's operating account. Two components:

• Card processing — set by the card networks and our processor, passed through at cost.
• Platform fee — our charge, a percentage of tip volume, stated in your onboarding confirmation.

A venue may offer guests the option to cover these fees. Where a guest accepts, the recipient receives the full amount the guest selected. Where they do not, fees come out of the gross. Either way, the guest sees the exact total before authorising the charge.

If processing a tip would cost as much as the tip itself, we decline the charge rather than collect it.

4. Settlement and payouts

A captured tip is held for a rolling settlement window — two business days by default — before becoming eligible for payout. Business days exclude weekends and US banking holidays, because ACH does not run on them.

Payout runs are drafted on the venue's configured schedule and submitted by an authorised person at the venue. We may extend a settlement window or hold a payout where we have a reasonable, documented suspicion of fraud, where a chargeback is pending, or where a payment provider or regulator requires it. We will tell the affected parties when we are permitted to.

A contractor payout requires a signed W-9 on file. This is a real prerequisite: paying first would make the year's information reporting impossible to correct.

5. Refunds, chargebacks, and returns

• A refund reverses the corresponding pool balance or individual total as well as the charge, so a pool cannot distribute money that no longer exists.
• A tip already paid out cannot be reversed from a recipient's bank account. Those cases go through support and are resolved between the venue, the recipient, and us.
• A returned ACH transfer is retried where the return reason indicates a temporary problem, and flagged for a new account where it does not. We do not retry into a closed account to generate return fees.
• Chargebacks are handled under our processor's rules. Where a chargeback is granted after payout, the venue is responsible for the shortfall.

6. Venue responsibilities

If you operate a venue on this platform, you are responsible for:

• the lawfulness of your tip pool — who may participate, and any mandatory contribution limits, are set by wage-and-hour law in your jurisdiction, not by us;
• correctly classifying each person as an employee or a contractor;
• your own payroll tax obligations for W-2 employees, including reporting tips paid through this platform;
• the accuracy of hours you record or adjust, since they determine an hours-based split;
• who at your venue holds which permissions, particularly payout authority.

We provide the audit trail that makes these things checkable. We do not provide legal, tax, or accounting advice, and nothing on this site is such advice.

7. Earner responsibilities

• Give accurate legal name and taxpayer identification details. An incorrect TIN produces an incorrect information return.
• Link a bank account you own. Do not link someone else's.
• Keep your contact details current, so payout and tax notifications reach you.
• Handle your own tax obligations on tips received. We report; we do not withhold, and we do not advise.

8. Guests

A tip is voluntary and, once authorised, final. If you tipped in error, contact the venue — they can refund it before it is paid out. We do not charge you a fee for leaving a tip; where you elect to cover processing costs, the amount is shown before you authorise anything.

9. Acceptable use

You may not use this service to:

• launder money, or route payments that are not genuinely gratuity;
• collect on behalf of a person who has not agreed to it;
• generate identities or requests at abusive volume, or attempt to circumvent rate limits;
• probe, scrape, or attempt to access records belonging to another account.

We may suspend an account that does any of this, and will report activity we are legally required to report.

10. Availability

We aim for the service to be available whenever a room is open, and we will give notice of planned maintenance. We do not promise uninterrupted availability, and we are not liable for tips not collected during an outage — though if an outage is our fault we will say so plainly rather than describe it as a partner issue.

11. Limitation of liability

To the maximum extent permitted by law, our aggregate liability arising out of these terms is limited to the platform fees you paid us in the twelve months preceding the claim. We are not liable for indirect, incidental, or consequential damages, including lost gratuity volume or lost profits.

This limit does not apply to our own fraud, wilful misconduct, or gross negligence, nor to any liability that cannot lawfully be limited.

12. Ending it

You may close an account at any time. Settled funds already owed will be paid out on the normal schedule — we do not withhold gratuity to discourage you from leaving. Records we are required to retain, including payment records and tax documents, are kept as described in the privacy policy, and your tax documents remain available to you.

We may suspend or close an account for a material breach of these terms, for unlawful activity, or where a payment provider requires it.

13. Changes

We may update these terms. Material changes will be notified to account holders by email before they take effect, and the date at the top will change. Continuing to use the service after that date means you accept the updated terms.

14. Governing law

These terms are governed by the laws of the State of Nevada, without regard to its conflict-of-laws rules. Venue, arbitration, and class-action provisions are deliberately left for counsel to complete — those clauses have real consequences and should not be drafted by guesswork.

15. Contact

legal@tip-tip-hooray.com for anything on this page, or hello@tip-tip-hooray.com for everything else.