Last updated: Feb 25, 2026, 3:07 PM
Looking for a live training experience with a Toast Training Expert? Sign up for a live Toast Classroom session to help you set-up and get started with Tips Manager! Select the button below to sign up.
Toast Classroom - Tips Manager
| First Steps Next Steps
Troubleshoot
|
The federal government outlines tip pooling regulations in the Fair Labor Standards Act (FLSA). State and local governments may have their own regulations too. Prior to setting up tip pools and/or shares for your restaurant within Toast Web, you should consult an HR professional and consider federal, state, and local laws when defining your restaurant's tip policy and distribution rules.
When troubleshooting Toast Tips Manager, there are some general steps to take first:
Do you suspect Tips Manager is missing some tips? Follow these steps to compare the tips and gratuities that Toast recorded for you versus the tips and gratuities that Tips Manager pooled.
Tip distribution using Tips Manager will only appear in the Tip Management report and will not show up in the Sales Summary or Labor Summary under the Tips sections; however, the total tips collected by source will show up in the Sales Summary. There could be a small discrepancy (cents) between the Tip Management report and the figures in the Sales Summary as the system will round to the nearest cent so that employees are never short-changed.
There are to the Tip Management report. Navigate to Reports > Labor performance > Tip management to see the Top Level view. Select a day to open the By Day view. Then select an employee to display the Employee Receipt view.
These are a few examples of Tips Manager calculations to help troubleshoot your policy or an employee's tips on a given day:
Let's say an employee has clocked into the Cook job on a given day, so they are a recipient in the above tips pool called Server/Counter to Cook.
An employee clocked into the Cook job on a given day, so they are a recipient in the above tip pool called Online Ordering.
An employee clocked into the Cook job on a given day, so they are a recipient in the above tip pool called Online Ordering.
An employee clocked into the Server job on a given day, so they are a contributor in the above tip pool called Support Staff Tip Out.
There are several reasons your tip pool may not be distributing tips as you'd expect it to, and more than one could be present. Review these settings and pages to troubleshoot incorrect distributions:
| Concern | Action |
|---|---|
| An employee may not have clocked out for their shift | Visit the Time Entry Management and with the correct information. This will immediately update your tip management report. |
| Employees aren't assigned to the correct job | Check the in Toast Web and update with the correct information. This will immediately update your tip management report. If you've begun payroll already, follow all the steps in . |
| Employees didn't clock into the correct job | Check the Time Entry Management and with the correct information. This will immediately update your tip management report. If you've begun payroll already, follow all the steps in . |
| Employees rang in sales under the wrong number | Search the for discrepancies. |
| There isn't a rule built for a job being used | Create a with that job as the contributor. Consider jobs like leads, keys, or captains; these can be commonly missed. |
| There is a duplicate job in Toast Web | One or both may be assigned to the tip pool and employees may be assigned to the incorrect/duplicate job. Cross-reference the with the jobs present in your tip pool. |
| The tip pools are out of order and money is being left over | Review the Order of Operations section of . |
| The online ordering server isn't distributing its tips | Verify you've followed all steps in . |
| There is a tip source (i.e. cash gratuity) that doesn't have a distribution rule | Create a distributing that tip source. |
| The tip pools are set up by percentages rather than points | A job that isn't clocked in that day/service period is part of a percentages tip pool. Switch this pool over to (more common) or to be hybrid (busser/food runner) so there is always someone clocked into that role for distribution. |
This is most likely due to a recipient job not being present for that service period/day. Say that a food runner job is part of the recipient list of your pool, but on Mondays, no food runners are scheduled. The percentage of tips that would have gone to the food runners clocked in on Monday will instead return to the contributing jobs that initially collected the order and tip. This may happen multiple times during a service period/day.
First of all, here's an example of how this may happen. Let's say your tip sharing policy is set up like this:
In this scenario, let's say one of your servers had $100 in Food and NA Beverage sales for their workday/service period, but they only received $2 in tips for that workday/service period. However, the policy above states that they need to be tipping out 5% of their Food and NA Beverage sales.
So they owe $5, but they only made $2. Toast does not gather the remaining $3 from the restaurant or from the server's wages. Instead, the recipient jobs will receive less than they are owed. So $2 in tips divided up by the policy rules above means that the busser recipient job would receive $1.20, or 60% of $2. The runner recipient job would receive $0.80, or 40% of $2. Check out the Tip Management Report - Tips Receipt section of to learn how to reconcile tip amounts with your employees.
Toast defines employer-kept service charges as net sales for the business whereas mandatory gratuity is a type of wage that is owned by employees. Since Tips Manager only distributes wages that should be paid to employees, you will not be able to include employer-kept service charges in this system. Learn more in .
On the other hand, you might mistakenly set up an employer-kept service charge as mandatory gratuity. When this happens, a service charge can appear in your tip pooling when it shouldn't. To remove this "gratuity" from your tip pool and correctly set this up as an employer-kept service charge for the future:
If you chose the Service Period (shift) pooling interval, then it's important to consider the midpoint of an employee's time entries. For instance, if an employee clocks in at 10:00 a.m. and clocks out at 2:00 p.m., then noon is used as the midpoint. Toast will now check which service period noon falls into and the checks associated with this employee are then tied to that service period. However, if a check is transferred to a different individual, then the time of transfer will determine which shift the tip will be a part of.
Any updates made to the may take up to four hours to sync to Tips Manager. Come back after this time has elapsed and you may now use the new shift hours to create or update your tip pools. Once the sync has been made, any tip pools not yet approved will retroactively update to reflect the new shift hours configuration.
If your policy is based upon shifts you set up on the , a check that falls outside of all shift boundaries will be attributed to the nearest shift. For example, maybe you're closed between a 2:00 pm lunch shift and a 4:00 pm dinner shift every day, but for whatever reason, a check is opened at 2:30 pm. This check would be attributed to the lunch shift pool since it's the closest one. If a check were opened at 3:15 pm, it would belong to the dinner shift pool.
This can work if different job codes are created for different days or locations. As an example, you might create a Sunday - Thursday Weekday Server job code and a Friday - Saturday Weekend Server job code. Set up separate pools for the different jobs that reflect the intended tip policy and verify that your employees know when to clock in with each job code. offers more details on various Tips Manager configurations.
Alternatively, since Toast Tips Manager is a "live" system, you can set up a tip policy to reflect a certain day's tip policy, then approve only those days. Next, you can adjust the tip policy to reflect the other days in your week and then approve those days. However, this is more time-consuming, must be done manually, and does not allow for accurate Tips Receipt instant reporting, so the first option is better in almost all cases.
It depends if the tip interval has been approved. When tip intervals are pending and have not yet been approved, the final tip earnings calculated based on the published tip policy can change due to either a change in tip policy or that belongs in that interval. If the tip interval has been approved or sent to payroll, the tip interval is locked and changing the time entry will not be reflected in the Tip Management report.
An employee who's working a "double" or "all-day" that spans between more than one shift (as they are set up in Toast) does not need to clock out in order to be associated with each shift.
Currently, Toast Tips Manager does not allow adjustments to the shift times on individual dates. When your tip pooling interval is set to Service Period, Tips Manager uses your to distinguish between parts of the day and an employee's time entry defines when they were participating in the pool.
If the check is transferred to a new employee with a different job, that employee becomes the new check owner and any tips or gratuity on that check will be associated with the new employee's job. The same system re-assignment would also occur when using the Service Period tip pooling interval. If a check is originally opened by a lunch shift server and is later transferred to a dinner shift bartender, the check would then belong in the dinner shift pool, even though the check's open time may suggest that it should belong in the lunch shift pool.
Overriding the tip pool while the policy is in effect is not currently an option. Rules apply to all days of the week for all employees clocked into jobs included in the rules.
You may decide to make jobs and tip pool cards specific to special events. Visit the Generic Employees and Jobs for Large Parties and Shared Tables section of to find out more.
No. Toast adjusts hours worked based on unpaid breaks, so employees would not be excluded from specific orders if they were on a break when the order was opened.
Navigate to Employees > Payroll management > Tip pooling policy. Find the desired policy card and select Remove pool at the bottom of the card.
There are times when a pool's calculations result in a split that can't be evenly broken down to the cent. To ensure we aren't reducing employee tips, we round up to the nearest cent. If this happens during a few pools, it can add a few cents, up to one per employee per shift.
If you use Toast Payroll, your employees can use the to view their tip calculations and final totals. The values can only be viewed in the app once tips have been approved and sent to payroll via the buttons at the top of the tip management report.
If you do not use Toast Payroll, you can download and print the Tips Management report to show to your employees. In , navigate to Reports > Labor > Tip management, select a day from the chart, and use the download button in the upper-right corner. You may wish to select the gear icon to check your filters first.
Note: An employee's shift review will show their pre-pooled tips earned amount, but does not show their take home/post-pool amount.
In many cases, a may be unaccounted for in the tip policy or some items being sold may not be assigned to a sales category. Verify your tip pooling policy setup and use the steps in the View Items With No Sales Categories Attached section of to look for items without sales categories attached.
In other cases, a tip policy may be using percentages for recipient jobs and one of those recipient jobs is not present for a particular service period or day. This will cause the tips intended for that job to be redistributed to the contributor, so they will not tip out the full percentage in that service period/day.
The most common issue pertains to employee shifts or checks that were not closed on that day. In , navigate to Reports > Labor > Shifts and set the Custom date selector to only one day. If there are any entries in the Open Shifts section that also contain tips, these tips did not make it to Tips Manager. Close these shifts by so their tips will show up in the Tips Management report.
If you locate any past shifts that were still open, they may have open checks within them. On your Toast device, use the Payment Terminal mode to close out any open/paid check during the same time period.
Another thing to check will be the gear icon on the Top Level or By Day view. This contains filters that will affect the information you see on your report.
If a tip pooling policy fails to account for a tip in some way or another, the tip will stay with the owner of the ticket where the tip came from. Toast Tips Manager cannot interact with or apply a policy towards a tip that it doesn't have rules for, so it will need to be distributed manually.
If tips fail to send to Toast Payroll for one or more dates, you'll see an error message indicating the issue. Find the message you see below and follow the steps for resolution.
The payroll calendar associated with the location has already been processed or there is an open payroll period prior to the current dates. If you already processed payroll for this time period, you may wish to manually include these tips/gratuities into a future payroll. Use the values in the Tips and gratuity after pooling column of the and follow the steps in Adding a One-Time Earning section of .
This error informs you that an employee included on a tip pool is not mapped, so their tip amounts from the pool cannot sync to Toast Payroll.
First, verify all employees in Toast Payroll have a mapped profile. Navigate to Settings > Toast > Employees and use to map all employees in the Payroll Employee tab. Afterwards, switch over to the Unmapped POS Employee tab and ensure you don't have a for any of your employees. Duplicate profiles can sometimes be the source of an employee who is "mapped," but tips are still not syncing. This indicates the wrong profile is mapped.
Employees can be a part of multiple , usually because they work in multiple locations. When this is the case, make future plans to send tips over for all pay groups before processing payroll for any group. This error means one of the employees who received tips at this location on the date you're trying to send is also in another in Toast Payroll and that pay group has already processed payroll.
When you encounter this error, you may wish to manually include these tips/gratuities into a future payroll. Use the values in the Tips and gratuity after pooling column of the and follow the steps in Adding a One-Time Earning section of .
One of the employees does not have a timesheet associated with an active payroll on that date. Each employee who receives tips after pooling requires a timesheet present in that payroll period at that location to ensure Toast can sync the tips to the correct timesheet and payroll.
Contact us at to receive assistance with this error.
If you are not satisfied with Toast Tips Manager, reach out to our Customer Support team to speak with a representative about canceling or removing the tip pooling service. Start a live chat with our Customer Support team. Chat is available in Toast Web and Payroll Web (blue support button in bottom right of every page) and the Support tab in the Toast Now app.
For more information on how to contact support view "" or go to .
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 advice.
| Generic or communal drawers are being distributed tips/gratuity | Create a specific job called Drawer or don't assign the drawer a job and it will be distributed as a salaried employee. |
| An employee is receiving a higher amount of tips than expected | Review the jobs this employee (or group of employees) is assigned to. Then view your tip policy to check if those jobs are accurately represented (contributor jobs vs. recipient jobs). |
| Someone is receiving tips when they should not have | Check the job(s) this person clocked into within your timeframe. Do any of those jobs appear as a recipient in a tip rule? If so, you can simply change the job an individual clocked into via the Time Entry Management report. Otherwise, if you use a percentages model, check your policy for a rule containing a recipient job that was not present for a day/service period/order. |