Last updated: Mar 24, 2026, 11:18 AM
If you use the Toast POS system and it goes into Offline Mode, your POS data will not sync with Toast Web (learn more about Offline Mode: Outages and Disruptions: Use Toast During a Service Disruption). This will cause time entries and tip information to not immediately make it to the Toast Payroll system. Once your Toast POS devices come back online, the data will sync to Toast Web (and then to Toast Payroll), but submitting payroll before this information has appeared in the system can cause discrepancies. It is recommended that after any Toast device goes into Offline Mode, time entries and tip amounts from that offline time period are double-checked for accuracy before an associated payroll is submitted.
Toast strongly advises that you do not attempt to process employee payrolls while in Offline Mode. Toast recommends waiting until you're back online to process payroll, so all pieces of time entry and tip data have synced from the POS to Toast Web and then to Toast Payroll. The only exception to this would be if your system went offline after a pay period ended and all time entries and tips from the pay period have synced. If this is the case, you may decide to process payroll for that pay period, but should take extra time with the following one.
From Toast Web, try using the information in the report, the report, and the report as your baselines. This is the same data that Toast Payroll should have in its system, so check the clock-in/out times and total/individual tip amounts on these reports against the actual time an employee clocked in or out or the true amount of tips they should receive.
If adjustments need to be made, you can edit the employee's time () or edit their tip amount () (as long as the credit card payments have not been captured/batched) in Toast Web. This way, the actual tip amount and/or time entry will be correctly inputted in both Toast Web and Toast Payroll. If you use Toast Tips Manager, the tip amounts will also be updated in that module.
There are three types of disruptions to the Toast Payroll system:
All three of these are rare situations, and each situation is picked up by our Engineering team within moments of it happening. This immediately becomes the top priority for the team, and outages typically last less than 24 hours. If you are experiencing a Toast Payroll outage, you may want to use the resources in Toast Web to estimate pay and hours worked. Keep track of these payments and reconcile them with your payroll once it is available.
If this outage overlaps your due date to submit payroll and make the check date, you might choose to pay your employees in a different method. You can write manual (live) checks out of the company checkbook, or you may pay them in cash or via a payment app such as Venmo. Understandably, you do not have access to the deduction and tax information that would occur within a typical Toast Payroll, so you might decide to use a tax calculator. If this is not a viable option, it may be best to estimate the net amount of employee paychecks and make adjustments on the next payroll using the manual check process. See for steps on this process.
Although this is not a Toast outage of any kind, this is a type of disruption that could affect your payroll figures. When a credit card processing company is not online, and credit card payments are not syncing to Toast Web, you may have discrepancies in tip amounts. In this case, payroll processing is not affected, so if you need to process payroll ASAP, you'll want to manually add tips for employees. It's best practice to do this in Toast Web and let the numbers sync to Toast Payroll so that all reports reflect the actual amount of tips per employee, but if payments are not appearing in Toast Web, you may want to add them to Toast Payroll and return to Toast POS when payments are available.
This content is for informational purposes and is not intended as legal, tax, HR or any other professional advice. Please contact an attorney or other professional for specific advice.