For venues
Your house rules. Their money. No cash box.
Restaurants, bars, nightclubs, theaters, event rooms. Whether your gratuity goes into a pool or straight to the person who earned it, Tip Tip Hooray! collects it without cash and pays it out on a schedule you set — entirely outside your POS.
Two models, one system
Pooled, direct, or both in the same room
Most venues need both — a house pool for the floor and individual codes for the bartender everyone asks for by name. You don't have to choose one.
Pooled tipping
Everything a shift collects lands in one pot and is divided at close. Four ways to divide it:
- Evenly Same share for everyone on shift.
- By points The classic system — servers at 10, barbacks at 4.
- By hours Proportional to time actually worked.
- By weight Your own per-person multiplier.
You can also skim a set percentage off the top into a back-of-house pool, so the kitchen shares in a good night without anyone doing arithmetic on a napkin.
Direct tipping
One code, one person. What a guest gives them is theirs — nothing to divide and nothing to dispute.
- Their name on the screen Or not — you decide whether the guest sees who they're tipping.
- Attributed to the shift Each tip is tied to the shift it was earned on, for reporting.
- Guest notes come through A short thank-you from a guest reaches the person, not a queue.
Codes point at a destination rather than at a person, so a manager can repoint one from an individual to a pool without reprinting anything.
From tap to bank
Rolling two-day settlement, then out on your schedule
A tip is captured the moment a guest taps. It then rests a two-business-day settlement window — business days, because ACH doesn't run at the weekend and pretending otherwise just makes Monday a disappointment.
Once settled, funds join the next payout run: daily, weekly, or biweekly, your call. Each run is drafted automatically and then waits for a human to send it. A bug should never be one click away from a room full of wrong payments.
- One ACH line per person Not one per tip — your staff see a single deposit, not forty.
- Returns are handled properly A closed account is flagged for a new one rather than retried into more fees.
- Nothing goes out twice Every run is keyed to its period, so a retried job is a no-op.
Payout run · week ending Sunday
- Tips collected
- 412
- Gross
- $3,884.00
- Fees
- $61.90
- Dani B. · bartender
- $1,204.50
- Marcus O. · server
- $986.25
- Priya N. · server
- $901.75
- Tomas R. · barback
- $729.60
- Sent by ACH
- $3,822.10
Illustrative figures. Every run reconciles by addition — gross minus fees equals what went out, with no rounding line to explain away.
Day to day
The things a manager actually needs
Reports that reconcile
Daily or weekly, by jar and by person. Gross, fees, and net always add up, and failed charges are counted separately — a bad payments night and a slow night are different problems.
Codes anywhere you want them
Check presenters, table tents, bar-rail NFC tags, lanyard cards, a link in a program. Scans versus tips per placement tells you which spots earn.
Permissions with teeth
A shift lead closes pools and corrects hours. Sending money out and linking bank accounts are separate permissions held by fewer people, and every use is logged.
Hours without a new scheduler
Punch in the app or push shifts from your existing system. Hours only exist here to make an hours-based split defensible.
Mixed staff, correct taxes
W-2 employees settle through you. Contractors get their own ACH rail and a 1099-NEC. One room, one set of codes, two right answers.
An audit trail worth having
Pool closes, hour adjustments, payout runs, role changes. Corrections are new entries, never quiet edits — because a wage question deserves evidence.
The fair questions
What owners push back on
Will this slow down my service?
Nothing changes at the terminal. The guest tips on their own phone, on their own time — often after your server has already walked away. If anything it removes the "do you have change?" conversation.
My staff don't trust a new system with their tips.
Fair, and the answer is transparency rather than reassurance. Every person sees their own tips as they land, their own share of every pool close and the weight it was calculated from, and their own payout history. Nobody has to take your word for the split.
What if a guest disputes a tip?
A refund reverses the pool balance or the individual's total as well as the charge, so a pool can never pay out money that no longer exists. A tip already sent by ACH can't be clawed back from a staff member's account — those go through support, with the original processor record attached.
Do I need to give you my bank login?
No. Accounts are linked through Plaid and we store a processor token plus the last four digits — never a full account or routing number, and never credentials. A leaked record from us couldn't move a dollar.
How long does setup actually take?
An afternoon, most of which is your processor's business verification — the same identity checks any payments provider runs. Adding your people and printing codes is minutes. You can add staff before they've ever signed in.
Getting started
Four steps and you're collecting
Create the venue
Name, address, EIN, and how you want gratuity handled by default. Business verification runs in the background.
Add your people
Mark each one employee or contractor. They don't need an account yet — you can add "Dani, bartender" and print her code the same shift.
Set the split
Build your pools, pick a method, set any back-of-house cut. Preview the split before you commit to it.
Print and go
Generate codes, put them where guests already look, and watch the first tip arrive before last call.
Multi-location groups and casinos: get in touch and we'll walk the room with you.