How to keep track of your cash tips
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Write it down the same night, one line per shift: the date, your cash tips and your card tips as two separate amounts, the hours you worked, where you worked and which shift it was, and anything you tipped out. That is the whole habit. A notebook does it, a spreadsheet does it, and an app does it. What matters is that every shift gets its line while you still know the numbers.
Why cash is the easiest money to lose track of
Card tips leave a trail. They show up on a pay stub or in a payout, and somebody else has written the number down for you.
Cash does not. Nobody sends you a statement for it. It goes into the same pocket as the rest of your money, it pays for the gas on the way home, and by the end of the week the bills from Tuesday and the bills from Saturday are one pile. You know roughly what you made. Roughly is the problem: you cannot tell which night was good, or whether this month was better than last, from a feeling.
What to write down for each shift
- The date, so the shift belongs to a day of the week and a month.
- Cash tips and card tips, separately. They arrive differently, and keeping them apart lets you check each against where it came from: the card side against your pay stub, the cash side against what you counted.
- Hours worked. Without them you have a total and no idea what an hour was worth.
- Where, and which shift. The workplace, and whether it was lunch, dinner, a close or a double, whatever you call your shifts. This is what lets you compare later.
- What you tipped out, if you tip out to the bar, the bussers or a pool. That money left the same night, and it is not part of what you took home.
Example: Friday, dinner at the bistro. Cash $120, card $60, 6 hours, tipped out $15.
That line takes seconds to write and it answers every question you will ask of it later.
Why the hours matter
A total on its own cannot tell you whether a night was good. The hours are what turn it into something you can compare.
Example: say tonight was $180 in tips. Over 6 hours, that is $30 an hour. Over 9 hours, it is $20 an hour. Same total, very different night.
If you only write down one thing besides the money, make it the hours.
Write it down the same night
Log it before you go to sleep, or on the way out of work, while the number is still the one you counted. By the next morning it is an estimate, and by the end of the week it is a guess. A missed night is the one gap a record cannot fill afterwards, because the only person who knew the number has forgotten it.
Three ways to keep the record
A notebook. Costs nothing and never runs out of battery. It is also the hardest to add up: every total, every average and every comparison is arithmetic you do by hand, and a lost notebook takes the whole record with it.
A spreadsheet. Adds up for you once it is set up, and it is easy to keep forever. Setting it up is the work: columns, formulas, and remembering to open it on your phone at the end of a long shift, where a spreadsheet is fiddly to type into.
An app made for it. The least effort per shift, because the form already knows your workplace and your shifts, and it does the arithmetic the moment you save. The cost is trusting where your record lives, so check that you can get all of it back out.
Any of the three works if you use it every shift. The best one is the one you will still be using in a month.
What TipMefy does
TipMefy is the third kind. Each shift records cash tips and card tips as separate amounts, with the hours, the workplace and which shift it was. It asks for all of those before it saves. Tip-out is a field you can switch on if you tip out.
When you save, it shows what the shift earned and what that came to per hour. The earned figure is what you kept: your tips, minus what you tipped out, plus your hourly pay if you have entered your wage for that workplace.
If your record started in a spreadsheet, TipMefy can import it, and it shows you what it is about to add before it adds anything.
Getting your data out
Whatever you use, make sure the record is yours to take. In TipMefy, every shift you have logged exports as a CSV file (the date, the amount, cash or card, the shift, the hours and the tip-out), which opens in any spreadsheet. The export is free, and your history is never locked behind a subscription.