Tips booked as sales
Card tips sit in your deposit but belong to staff. Booked as revenue, they inflate sales and hide what labour really costs.
How Savoury handles it: tips are held as a liability and paid out and reported through payroll.
Restaurant payroll, with tips handled correctly from the start.
Hours, overtime, tip pools, tip-outs and staff who work at more than one location. Payroll set up the way restaurants actually pay people, and kept separate for US and Canadian rules.
One pay period, all the moving parts
Regular hoursby role
Overtime and premiumsby rule
Card tipsby shift
Tip pool and tip-outsby policy
Labour costby location
Payroll is never just payroll.
Why restaurant payroll goes wrong.
Restaurant payroll mixes hourly pay, tips that belong to staff, shift rules and people who move between locations. Payroll software can run the calculation, but only if it is set up for how your restaurant actually works. When it isn't, the errors show up as unhappy staff, wrong labour cost and tax filings that don't match.
Tip pools nobody can explain
Pooling and tip-out rules live in someone's head or a spreadsheet, and change with every manager.
How Savoury handles it: your tip policy is written down and applied the same way every pay period.
Staff across locations
A cook who works two kitchens shows up as cost in one, or in neither.
How Savoury handles it: hours are allocated to the location where they were worked.
Two countries, two rulebooks
US and Canadian payroll taxes, remittances and year-end slips follow different rules and deadlines.
How Savoury handles it: US and Canadian payroll are kept separate and never mixed.
What restaurant payroll includes.
From the timesheet to the remittance, set up for hourly and tipped staff.
- Hourly and salaried staff
- Overtime and shift premiums
- Card and cash tips
- Tip pools and tip-outs
- Staff across locations
- Labour cost by location
- US payroll taxes
- Canadian remittances
- Year-end slips (W-2s, T4s)
- Payroll tied to the books
How it works.
Review how you pay people today
Roles, pay rates, tip policy, scheduling and payroll software, location by location.
Set up the rules once
Overtime, premiums, tip pooling and tip-outs are configured to match your written policy.
Run payroll on schedule
Hours and tips come in, pay goes out, and taxes and remittances are kept current.
Feed the P&L
Labour lands in the books by location and by front and back of house, so labour cost is a number you can act on.
Restaurant payroll questions
How should restaurant tips be accounted for?
Tips are not revenue. How they move from the guest to the staff member, and what gets reported.
Read the answer →What is restaurant prime cost?
Cost of goods sold plus total labour, the number that tells you whether menu and schedule work together.
Read the answer →Multi-location accounting
Shared staff, shared costs and a P&L for every location.
See the service →Restaurant bookkeeping
Where payroll lands in the books, and how labour shows up on your P&L.
See the service →
Know where your money is going.
Seven quick questions, and a Savoury restaurant accounting specialist will come back with where your numbers stand.