How does Better Tips split tips between employees?

The rule

For every card payment, Better Tips asks one question: which tip-eligible employees were clocked in at this location at this moment? The tip on that payment is split equally between them. So is the share of Square's fee that fell on that tip.

That's the whole rule. There's no weighting by hours, no points, no roles. It's the same approach as Square's own per-transaction tip pooling, so if you already pool tips that way in Square the numbers will line up.

A worked example

Three baristas at one café, overlapping shifts on a Saturday:

Now four card payments, each with a $6 tip:

Totals for the day: Ava $11.00, Jordan $8.00, Maya $5.00. Ava worked the morning alone, so the morning tips are hers. The 2 pm rush is split three ways. Nobody has to decide who "deserves" what; the clock-ins decide.

The fee works the same way. If the 14:00 payment was a $30 charge and Square's fee on it was 93¢, the tip was 20% of the charge, so 18.6¢ of fee belongs to the tip, and each of the three gets 6.2¢ of it. Over a pay period those fractions of a cent add up to the Fee column on each employee's row.

Why per transaction instead of hours

Splitting by hours treats a quiet Tuesday morning the same as a Saturday rush. Splitting per transaction pays people for the business that happened while they were on the floor. It also makes every number traceable: each employee's tip total is the sum of specific payments during specific timecards, which is exactly what you want when someone asks "where did this figure come from?"

Hours still matter. An employee who works more shifts is clocked in for more payments and ends up with a bigger share. It's just earned transaction by transaction.

Edge cases

Nobody clocked in. A payment at 6:55 before Ava clocks in has nobody to go to. Better Tips spreads that tip equally across the tip-eligible staff who worked that location that day — Ava, Jordan and Maya each get $2.00 of it — matching Square's "distribute unattributed tips equally" behaviour. It happens automatically, so no tip is left off the report.

Someone forgot to clock out. An open shift is treated as running until the moment you run the report, so that employee still shares in every tip taken while they were on the floor — and in any taken after they actually left — while adding no hours or base pay to the report yet. Close the timecard in Square Team and run again for the final figure.

Different locations. Clock-ins are matched to the location where the payment happened. An employee clocked in at your downtown shop doesn't share in tips at the one across town.

Non-tipped roles. Better Tips follows the tip-eligible flag on each job in Square Team. A manager on a non-tipped job can be clocked in all day and won't appear in the split.

Reading your report shows where each of these numbers lands in the final table.