Frontline and dependent venues

Every venue in Tip Sheet is one of two kinds. The choice is made once, when the venue is created, and it decides which screens the venue has and where its tips come from. Get it right before you create the venue.

The short version

	Frontline venue	Dependent venue
Where its tips come from	Customers, at the till. Card tips arrive from your POS, and you enter cash tips yourself.	A share taken from one or more frontline venues. It never takes tips itself.
Who works there	People who serve customers: bar, floor, kitchen.	People who support several venues, or a group you want to treat differently.
Connections	One POS and one timesheet system.	A timesheet system, if you choose one when you create it. Never a POS.
Dashboard	Yes.	No. There is no daily collection to chart.
How it appears	A blue F beside its name, in the venue picker and on the venues list.	A red D beside its name.

Most venues are frontline. A pub, a restaurant, a café, a bar: anywhere customers pay and tip is a frontline venue, and if that is all you have, you can stop reading and create the venue.

When to use a dependent venue

Use a dependent venue when people who don't work a till should still get a share of the tips, or when a share should be set aside and worked out under its own rules. These are the situations it's built for. The Good Booze Group demo business has one of each.

Situation	What the dependent venue holds	In the demo
A kitchen shared by several venues	The shared kitchen team	Tikki Kitchen takes 15% from Tikki Tanda and 10% from The Tummy Tap
Head office and shared services staff	Teams that support every venue, such as events or reservations	Shared Services takes 2.5% to 5% from four venues
A house pool or slush fund	A single record for the pool	House takes 5% from The Sippin' Snail
A team that needs a different split	That team, with its own rules
Tips paid through payroll	Anyone whose share you pay another way
Tips held back, not paid out	A share kept in your own accounts	House holds its share back

A kitchen shared by several venues

A central kitchen cooks for three restaurants. The chefs aren't on any one venue's roster, so they can't be on any one venue's tip sheet.

Create a dependent venue for the kitchen. Each restaurant it cooks for passes it a share of its tips, and the kitchen's tip sheet splits that among the chefs by their own hours and tip points. The same works for any team shared between venues, such as a cleaning or maintenance crew.

Head office and shared services staff

Your events team, reservations team or area managers work across every venue and help bring in the tips, but they don't serve customers at any one of them.

Create a dependent venue, such as Shared Services, with a department for each team. Every frontline venue they support passes it a share, usually a small percentage, and the teams share it by their own hours or days worked.

A house pool or slush fund

Some businesses set aside a share of tips before staff are paid, for example for staff functions or breakages. Tip Sheet has no separate slush-fund feature, but a dependent venue does the job.

1. Create a dependent venue, such as House, without a timesheet system.
2. Add one staff record to it by hand, also called House. With no timesheet system, every active person on a dependent venue counts equally, so this one record receives the whole share. See Add staff by hand.
3. Decide what happens to the pool, in the venue's Paying tips section. Either give the House record your business's own bank details, so the venue's bank file pays the pool into your account, or answer No to Does this venue pay out tips to staff? so the pool is held back instead. See Tips held back, not paid out.

The share shows as a Deduction on the tip sheet of each venue that contributes, so it's always visible what went into the pool.

A team that needs a different split

Suppose your kitchen should share its tips by hours alone, while the floor uses tip points to reward seniority. One venue has one set of rules, so the kitchen can't have its own without changing everyone else's.

Move the kitchen into a dependent venue. It receives its share from the frontline venue, then applies its own calculation, tip points and pay period to it.

Tips paid through payroll instead

Some businesses take a slice of every week's tips and pay it to the people who earned it another way, such as through payroll, rather than by a bank file from Tip Sheet.

Create a dependent venue for them. In its Paying tips section, answer Yes to Does this venue pay out tips to staff?, then choose Another way. It takes its share and works out each person's amount as usual, but Tip Sheet makes no bank file for it. You pay them your own way, with the tip sheet as the record.

Tips held back, not paid out

Sometimes a share of tips shouldn't go to anyone's bank account yet: a pool you keep in the business, or money you deal with outside Tip Sheet. A dependent venue that doesn't pay out tips does this. Tip Sheet calls it a withholding venue, and shows Withholding venue beside its name.

In its Paying tips section, answer No to Does this venue pay out tips to staff?, then choose what happens to the tips:

• Leave them in each frontline venue's account. Nothing moves. The share stays in each frontline venue's bank account, and you deal with it from there.
• Move them to another account. Add the account's name, BSB and account number. Each frontline venue's bank file then adds a transfer to that account, as long as that venue has Pay dependent venues their share ticked in its own Paying tips section.

Either way, a withholding venue pays nobody itself: it has no bank file of its own and can't be part of a pay run. See Paying tips.

A dependent venue is a real venue

It has its own staff list, its own tip sheet, its own pay periods and its own payout. That is what makes it flexible, and it is also more to look after. If the only thing you want is to give the kitchen a percentage of the pool, a department inside the frontline venue does that with far less setup. See Departments.

How the share moves across

The frontline venue works out its tips as usual. Before those tips are shared among its own staff, the agreed share is taken off the top and handed to the dependent venue. The dependent venue then shares what it received among its own people, using its own settings.

The share is taken from the frontline venue's whole day of tips: card, cash and any service charges counted as tips. It comes off before the frontline venue splits anything between its own service periods and departments.

The share can be a percentage of each day's tips or a fixed dollar amount per pay period, and each frontline venue can give a different figure. You set this up when you create the dependent venue, and you can change it later on its Tip Rules tab. See Dependent venue settings.

Don't pay the kitchen twice

If the frontline venue still has its own Kitchen department taking a share of the pool, and you also create a Central Kitchen dependent venue, the kitchen is paid from both. Remove or zero the department in the frontline venue when you move a team into a dependent venue.

Which venue type do I need?

I want to…	Create a…
Share tips among the people who served the customers who left them	Frontline venue
Give a kitchen or other team that supports several venues a share from each	Dependent venue
Give head office, events or reservations staff a share of every venue's tips	Dependent venue, with a department per team
Set aside a house pool or slush fund	Dependent venue with one House record, no timesheet system
Take a slice of tips each week and pay it through payroll instead	Dependent venue that pays its staff Another way
Hold a share of tips back without paying it to anyone	Dependent venue that doesn't pay out tips (a withholding venue)
Give one department its own tip rules	Dependent venue for that department
Give one department a bigger or smaller share of the same pool	Frontline venue, with departments

Frontline first

A dependent venue has to take its share from somewhere, so you can't create one until the business has at least one frontline venue. Until then, Dependent venue is greyed out on the new venue page.

Next

Create a venue walks through the screens for both kinds.