Paying tips out in cash

A stylist finishes at six and asks for her tips in cash. You open the drawer and count out forty dollars. Two weeks later payroll works out what she's owed — and the question that matters is whether it remembers the forty dollars.

Pay out tips, on the Cash drawer page, is how it remembers.

Handing it over

Two things happen at once. The till is debited, so the expected balance drops by what you handed over and the movement appears in the ledger as a Tip pay-out row. And a separate record is filed against that staff member for payroll.

The drawer has to be open. A cash sale with no open drawer is skipped silently — the sale is the important part and the drawer credit is a convenience. A tip pay-out is the opposite: the cash is physically leaving the till, so if there's nowhere to record that, RewireBox refuses rather than letting the drawer drift without explanation.

Not paid twice

This is the whole reason the feature exists.

Tips a client left on a card are counted up by payroll and paid to the stylist with the rest of their money. Tips handed over in cash on the night have already been paid — and without a record, payroll has no way to know that and would pay them a second time.

So when a pay period is worked out, each person's tips for the period are totalled and what you already handed them in cash is subtracted. The difference is what payroll still owes. The screen says as much in its own subtitle: payroll nets these out so the tip isn't paid twice.

If your salon settles tips entirely outside payroll — everyone takes their own cash at the end of the night — the columns still show what happened, they just stop adding to anybody's total. Which of those applies is set per person by the tip treatment on their compensation rule, in Set up pay.

The list shows every pay-out with its date, who took it, how much and any note, newest first. It's reached from the Tip pay-outs button at the top of the Cash drawer page rather than from the main menu, because it's a record you check when a number is queried, not a screen anybody works in daily.

What it can't do

A pay-out, once recorded, is part of the cash ledger and can't be edited or deleted. Pay the wrong person and the fix is the same as any other cash mistake: a pay-in to put the money back with a note saying why, then the correct pay-out. Both stay on the record.

Nor does this decide how much anybody is owed. It records a handover. What each person earned in tips, and how a pooled tip is divided, is payroll's job.