Book a tip

This chapter is about recording tips with the cash register system. This is particularly necessary from a legal point of view when tips are also paid without cash.

No tax or legal advice

The following information is for general guidance only and does not constitute tax or legal advice, as we are not authorised to give such advice. Please check the contents carefully and, if necessary, consult your tax advisor or other specialised experts to ensure that your approach complies with legal and tax requirements. Supplement or adapt our recommendations if this is necessary in your specific case. We also recommend that you document the results in your procedural documentation.

Book Best Practice Tips

Tipping is not tax-free in all situations, but the Hypersoft system has special Hypersoft functions and automatisms for tax-free tipping. We recommend that tips are always booked with the cash register system as part of the overview and fraud protection. Not booking tips leads in many cases to uncertainties in the correct accounting. If the unbooked tip is mixed with your income, problems with the cashier are inevitable.

Unfortunately, it also happens time and again that individual operators use tipping to gain advantage. For example, by favouring customers with non-billing services in order to receive personal tips (standard fraud principle in the USA). This has a direct effect on the guest and customer as a service that cannot be planned for by you and which is not provided by correctly working employees. Apart from the direct damage caused by a loss of turnover, there is a greater damage caused by an incongruent concept in which the personal success of the individual directly harms you. Irrespective of this, it can also have other negative (e.g. tax) consequences. Regular checks against fraud in tipping should therefore be standard practice.

Evaluations of (tax-free) tips allow conclusions to be drawn about the performance of individual hired workers or teams. Since in most cases where tipping can also be treated tax-free, this is also desired, we follow the tax-free approach in our practical examples and techniques. If you want to book the tip partly or always taxed there is also a way.

Tip function	Hypersoft POS	Hypersoft mPOS	Clou Mobile for Windows	Tax-free	Taxed
Book tipping items manually	yes	yes	yes	yes	no
Book item as a taxed tip	yes	yes	yes	no	yes
Tipping by overpayment with connected (EC-) card device	yes	yes	yes	yes	no
Subsequent tip at the POS	yes	-	-	yes	no
Tip query for overpayment at POS and mPOS	yes	yes	-	yes	no
Expenses and tips in PMS	yes	yes	yes	yes	no
Percentage tip	yes			yes	no
Tipping in reports		-	-	yes	no
Evaluate taxed tips		-	-	no	yes
NoCOO Tip	-	-	-	yes	manual posting
Webshop Tip	-	-	-	yes	manual posting
NoCOO Online Payment Tip	-	-	-	yes	no
eSolutions
Record tips with eSolutions API	-	-	-	adjustable	adjustable
In House Order Tip	Influences control	Influences control	Influences control	depending on operation responsibility	depending on operation responsibility

Make sure that your staff are fully trained and follow the instructions in HypersoftHypersoft procedure with tip bookings.

Note on the payment of tips in the event of a cash shortage

If you pay out tips immediately after finishing work and a significant proportion of your sales and tips are cashless, you may not have enough cash available to pay out all tips. To solve this problem, we recommend that you withdraw cash from your business account when necessary. For better traceability, you should keep a separate cash balance for this, for example under "Office cash balance" or "Vault cash balance." This procedure is similar to dealing with change, whereby the lack of cash for tips is a more recent challenge, which has arisen in particular due to the increasing proportion of cashless payments.

Legal aspects:

Documentation requirements: Make sure that all cash movements, including withdrawals from the bank account to pay out tips, are documented correctly and comprehensibly. In accordance with legal requirements, proper accounting is essential in order to avoid difficulties during an audit by the tax office.
Tipping regulations: Find out about the applicable regulations in your country regarding the payment of tips. In many countries, tips are tax-free as long as they are given voluntarily by the guest. Nevertheless, they should be paid out in a transparent and documented manner in order to avoid ambiguities.
Labour law aspects: If you pay out tips, you should ensure that the process is fair and comprehensible for all employees. Discrimination or preferential treatment in payment can lead to conflicts under labour law.

Note on "compulsory charges" for tips

There are different procedures for dealing with tips, and we are increasingly coming across so-called "compulsory charges". Operators who deal with payments and tips are obliged to give a portion of their total turnover as tips to other colleagues (e.g. 5% in a full-service establishment). As a rule, a residual amount of the tip remains with the employee and the other colleagues also receive a share.

Legal aspects:

Tax exemption of tips: In Germany, tips are generally only tax-free if they are given voluntarily and with the direct intention of the guest and employee. Compulsory levies or flat-rate distributions can call this tax exemption into question.
Transit of tips through the business: Tips that pass through the business or the owner are taxable. A compulsory levy procedure could give the impression that the tips are administered by the employer, which in turn could trigger a tax liability.
Liability and responsibility: As the owner, you are generally liable for correct taxation. As your employees are also not interested in paying tax on tips that are actually tax-free, you should coordinate your procedures in this area with your tax advisor.
Procedure description: It is recommended that a clear procedure description be drawn up that specifies which parts of the tips are tax-free and which are not. Non-tax-free tips should be taxed correctly in order to avoid later conflicts with the tax authorities.

eSolutions Tip

Tipping with eSolutions has been given its own chapter, please switch to the page Tipping with eSolutions.

No tax or legal advice

Further documentation:

Hypersoft procedure with tip bookings

Tip functions

Tipping with eSolutions

Back to the parent page: Hypersoft POS Cash Handling