Tips are one of the harder parts of running payroll for a restaurant or hospitality business. Cash tips, card tips, tip pools, and service charges all have to end up correct on a paycheck. With Genius, SocialSchedules, and Salaris Payroll connected, tips move from the point of sale to payroll without re-keying, and you stay in control at each step.
This article explains how tips travel through the three systems and where you make decisions along the way.
How it works at a glance
Tips follow a simple path:
Genius records cash and credit card tips at the point of sale, as well as service charges ('auto-gratuities').
SocialSchedules brings those tips in, shows them on a tips report, and lets you pool them if you use tip management.
Salaris receives the tips as part of each payroll.
What tips are brought into SocialSchedules, and when
SocialSchedules imports two types of tips from Genius:
Charged tips: tips added to card payments. Each one is linked to the transaction it came from.
Declared tips: cash and other tips that staff report at the end of their shift.
You decide how each type of tip is handled:
Taken home by employees at the end of their shift. The tips don't go through payroll.
Paid through payroll. The tips are sent to Salaris and appear on the employee's paycheck.
You can choose separately for cash tips and credit card tips.
You can also choose whether the proportional credit card processing fee is removed before a tip is passed on to the employee.
Viewing tips in SocialSchedules
Tips don't appear on timecards. They have their own tips report, which you can view:
By day
By date range
By worker
The report splits tips into those already paid vs those due, so it can be easily exported for payroll (either your own payroll solution via CSV, or directly into Salaris).
For now, tips are viewed by managers in the tips report, and aren’t shown to employees in the SocialSchedules mobile or desktop app.
Using tips for tip pooling
If you use tip management, tips can be pooled and shared out among staff according to your rules. The results of a pool flow back into the tips report. You can see the raw tips as they came in from Genius, and the tips after the pool has been applied.
Tip management is an optional add-on module (additional cost) that automates pooling and payouts based on your rules, saving you time and keeping tip splits accurate and transparent. Learn more here.
Service charges (coming soon)
Support for service charges within SocialSchedules is expected November 2026
Service charges, also referred to as auto-gratuities, are not the same as tips, so they're handled differently.
Service charges are wages, not tips. A tip is a voluntary payment from a customer. A service charge is added by the business, so it's treated as pay.
They can be pooled, but not mixed with tips. A service charge can be included in a pool, but it stays separate from true tips and isn't combined with them.
They count toward overtime. Because service charges are wages, they're included when overtime is calculated, including weighted average overtime for employees who work at more than one pay rate in a week.
SocialSchedules will soon bring in all service charges from Genius. You will be able to choose how they're shared:
The business keeps them
They're split between the business and employees
Employees keep them all
Unless you use tip management to distribute them across your team, a service charge will be attributed to the person on the ticket it came from.
Service charges are shown as a separate column on the tips report and mapped to a separate earning code in Salaris, to ensure they are considered as wages and not tips for tax purposes.
Sending tips to Salaris
In Salaris, you can choose where your tips are sourced from. Options include manual (a good option if you pool tips external to SocialSchedules); SocialSchedules (if tips are passed onto employees without passing through a tip pool), or Tip Management (for tips that pass through our tip management solution) as your tip source.
After that, tips flow into every payroll automatically. You can still add or adjust tips by hand when you run payroll, so you can correct a one-off issue without going back to SocialSchedules.
If you have tipped employees, it's also worth setting up their Treasury Tipped Occupation Codes (TTOCs) inside Salaris before year end so their W-2s are ready for the new federal tip deduction.