For servers & waitstaff
A tip log for servers.
Your section, your tip-out, your side work, your closing shift. Tipfolio is built around the ten seconds you have after you cash out — not around a spreadsheet you will abandon by week three.
- ✓Tip-out worked out automatically from your house's rule — % of tips, % of sales, or flat.
- ✓Cash and card kept separate, because your W-2 only really sees one of them.
- ✓Auto-gratuity logged apart from voluntary tips, which matters for the deduction.
- ✓Average take-home by night of the week — evidence for which shifts to fight for.
In short
- ✓Servers usually carry the most complicated tip-out in the building — record gross and tip-out separately, every night.
- ✓Auto-grat is not a tip. Log it apart from voluntary tips or you cannot isolate what qualifies.
- ✓Side work is hours. Leave it out and your rate is fiction.
- ✓Section and night drive earnings more than anything you control — but only a log proves it.
Why serving is the hardest tipped job to record
A bartender has one tip jar and a bank. A barista has a pooled total handed to them. A server has: cash tips, card tips, an auto-grat on the eight-top, a tip-out to the bar calculated one way, another to the bussers calculated another way, a comp that changed the sales figure, and a closing side-work hour that nobody counts.
All of which arrives at once, at midnight, when you want to leave. It is not that servers are worse at record-keeping — it is that serving generates more to record than any other tipped role.
The four numbers to protect
- Gross tips, cash and card separately. Your employer's system sees the card side reasonably well and the cash side barely at all. The cash figure is one only you can produce.
- Tip-out paid. Not the net you walked with — both numbers. Servers typically have the largest tip-out in the building, and it is the difference between what you earned and what you kept.
- Auto-grat, separately. Mandatory service charges are generally treated as wages rather than tips, which means lumping them in makes it impossible to isolate what might qualify for the tip deduction.
- Actual hours. Including the pre-shift and the forty minutes of side work after close.
The question worth answering
Not "what do I make" — "which shifts are worth taking". Servers have more leverage over their schedule than almost any other tipped role, and almost none of it gets used, because nobody has the evidence.
Once you have a couple of months logged, the patterns are usually stark: one night running well above the others, the patio beating the dining room in summer, brunch quietly underperforming the hours it eats. That is information you can take to a scheduling conversation.
The sales-based tip-out trap. If your house tips out on sales rather than tips, a badly tipping large party costs you twice — once in the tip that did not come, and once in the tip-out you owe on the sales anyway. Over a year that asymmetry is real money, and it is invisible unless you logged sales alongside tips. Compare the two bases →
What Tipfolio does with it
- Your job, wage and tip-out rule are set once and pre-filled every shift.
- A nightly nudge at 11:30 PM that opens straight onto the keypad.
- Every entry timestamped as you make it — the thing that makes it a contemporaneous record rather than a reconstruction.
- Multiple jobs, each with its own wage and rule, aggregating into one tax year.
- Exports as PDF or CSV, with the entry time on every line.
Questions
How much do servers actually make an hour?
It depends far more on the house, the section and the night than on the state's tipped minimum. The only figure worth acting on is your own blended rate across a few months: tips minus tip-out, plus base wage, over actual hours worked. It is usually lower than the number people quote and higher than the base wage on the stub.
Do I have to report cash tips as a server?
Yes. Cash tips are income. Separately, receiving $20 or more in tips in a month at one job generally triggers a requirement to report them to that employer in writing. See the guide on reporting cash tips for the detail.
Does my tip-out reduce my taxable tips?
Generally, tips passed to bussers, bar and runners under a genuine sharing arrangement are their income rather than yours — but only if you can show what you passed on, which means recording both numbers.
What about the automatic gratuity on large parties?
An auto-grat is typically a service charge rather than a voluntary tip, and is usually treated as wages. Keep it as its own line in your log.
Stop reconstructing your year from memory.
Tipfolio turns ten seconds a night into the daily record your deduction is built on. Free to log, forever.
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