Reading your report

The two views

By location is the payroll view: one row per employee for a single location and pay period, with a totals row. By employee is the detail view: one row per shift for a single team member, so you can see where their total came from. Both export to CSV with the same columns you see on screen.

The columns (By location)

The totals row adds every employee together. Cash tips never appear here: Better Tips only sees what passed through Square's card processing.

The columns (By employee)

Each row is one shift: Date, Hours, Wage (hourly rate), Base pay (Wage × Hours), Gross card tips, Fee, Net card tips, Gross hourly pay (Base pay ÷ Hours, i.e. the wage before tips) and Net hourly pay ((Base pay + Net card tips) ÷ Hours). The totals row sums the period for that person.

How the fee on a tip is calculated

Square charges its processing fee on the whole card charge — item, tax and tip together. Better Tips works out the tip's share of that fee for each payment:

fee on tip = payment fee × tip ÷ payment total

For example, a $40 bill with a $10 tip is a $50 charge. At Square's in-person rate of 2.6% + 15¢, Square's fee on that payment is $1.45. The tip is 20% of the charge, so the fee on the tip is 20% of $1.45, or 29¢. Better Tips reads the actual fee Square recorded on each payment, so if a payment was keyed in, online, or on a different plan, the right rate is used automatically. The numbers are summed per employee, to the cent, with no rounding until the final column.

How tips are split

Tips are split per transaction. For every card payment, Better Tips looks at which tip-eligible employees were clocked in at that location at the moment of the sale and divides the tip equally between them. The fee on that tip is divided the same way. This matches how Square's own per-transaction tip pooling works.

If a payment comes in when nobody tip-eligible is clocked in, Better Tips spreads that tip (and its fee) equally across the tip-eligible staff who worked that location that day. This mirrors Square's "distribute unattributed tips equally" behaviour and happens automatically, so no tip is left off the report.

Hours and base pay come from closed timecards only. A shift that's still open when you run the report contributes no hours, but it is treated as running until that moment for the tip split — so an employee who forgot to clock out still takes a share of tips. Close the timecard in Square Team and run again for the final figure.

The guide How Better Tips splits tips has a worked example with overlapping shifts.

Exporting to CSV

Click Export CSV on either view. From By location you get one row per employee plus a totals row — the file to hand to payroll. From By employee you get one row per shift for that person. Both open in any spreadsheet; amounts are in dollars with two decimals and hours are decimal hours (7.5, not 7:30).