Cash tips are tips your employees receive in cash rather than by credit or debit card. When an employee declares a cash tip, whether in your POS or time tracking system at the end of a shift or manually in TipHaus, they're simply recording that they received a certain amount.
This is also why cash tips are handled differently in TipHaus: credit card and gift card tips are tied to a sale, but declared cash tips are tied to a shift. That distinction is the reason cash tips need their own dedicated rule type, and why they can't be used in every tool built for card tips.
How Cash Tips Get Into TipHaus
There are two ways a cash tip ends up in TipHaus:
Automatic sync from your POS or time tracking system. If your staff enter cash tips in your point-of-sale or time-tracking system (Toast, Heartland, Square, etc.) at the end of a shift, TipHaus automatically pulls that data during your regular sync.
Manual entry directly in TipHaus. Cash tips can also be entered manually in TipHaus from the Reporting > Worked Shifts page.
How to Manually Enter, Edit, or Correct a Cash Tip
Navigate to the Reporting tab, then select Worked Shifts.
Locate the shift you need to adjust.
Click the Edit icon (the pencil) on the far right of that row.
Enter or update the cash tip amount under the Cash Tips field.
⚠️Cash tips declared in Tiphaus will not sync with the POS.
Declaring cash tips in the TipHaus Admin Dashboard can be restricted using custom roles and permissions, turning on/off the reporting:manage-cash-deposits permission, helping limit who can manually enter cash tips.
Click Here to Learn how to customize roles and permissions
Use this same path to fix a mistake, such as an over-declared amount or a cash tip claimed by the wrong employee. If the original entry synced in from your POS, correct it there first and resync, rather than editing it only in TipHaus — otherwise your fix may be overwritten on the next sync.
Total Cash Tips vs. Cash Paid Out
On the Edit Shift screen (Reporting > Worked Shifts > Edit), you'll see two separate fields for cash: Cash Tips and Cash Paid Out. They track opposite directions of money, so it's worth knowing which one you're filling in.
Cash Tips is what the employee says they received from guests in cash during that shift. Cash Paid Out is what the business gives the employee in cash — for example, if a manager cashes out a tip pool share on the spot, or hands over a portion of tips in cash instead of waiting for payroll. The amount input under Cash Paid Out will be deducted from the employee's take-home amount.
Say a server declares $40 in Cash Tips from guests, and the manager also hands them $40 in cash before payday. That $40 gets entered under Cash Paid Out on the same shift. Since the employee already has that money, it needs to be subtracted from what they're still owed — otherwise they'd get paid twice for the same $40.
As a rule of thumb, when editing a shift, enter what the guest gave the employee under Cash Tips, and enter what the business handed the employee under Cash Paid Out.
⚠️ Common mix-ups:
Don't confuse Cash Tips with Cash Sales. Some organizations allow their employees to keep the cash that customers use to pay for the entire sale, which is then deducted from the employee's tips. These are cash sales, and this is when the Cash Paid Out feature comes into play.
Cash-paid service charges are often confused with cash tips. It isn't the same. TipHaus will still pull and distribute that service charge as usual, so the employee needs to hand over the cash rather than keep it.
Using Cash Tips in Distribution Rules and Pools
Because declared cash tips are tied to shifts rather than sales, they're distributed through their own rule type — Cash Tip Pools and cash Tip-Sharing rules — separate from the rules used for credit card, gift card, or Sale Item Price-based tips.
If you don't have the option to create Cash Tip Pools and cash Tip-Sharing rules contact our support team and ask this to be enabled since its not activated by default. Once activated it will be available at all the locations/stores inside the organization.
Common Tip Distribution Logic for Declaring Cash Tips
Listing all the ways you can use cash tips in tip distribution can be a long list, here we share some of the most common uses for cash tips. Mostly, it falls in the following scenarios:
Employee declares cash and hands it to the organization for payment through the ETA program or a paycheck (no distribution expected).
If your employees declare cash tips, but there's no cash tip distribution or pooling in place, you simply want their declared cash tips added to their take-home pay. Contact our support team to have this backend setting turned on for your account.Employee declares cash and keeps the cash themselves (no distribution expected).
Have the employee report their cash tips in the POS or the TipHaus Employee App. By default, declared cash tips aren't added to the employee's take-home pay — this avoids paying them twice for the same tips. This is useful for reporting purposes since, in some states, cash tips are considered taxable income.
Employees pool their cash tips, which are then distributed based on hours worked during the day or the week, or split evenly regardless of hours worked.
If your tip distribution logic collects all cash tips before distributing them, the easiest approach is to set up a ghost employee with a ghost job code. Create a recurring shift for that job code so cash tips can be reported against it, then use the job code to build a tip-sharing rule or tip pool that distributes those cash tips.
For example, you could use a "Cash Bar Drawer" job code to pool cash tips for the bar, or set up two ghost job codes — one for AM staff and one for PM staff. For this AM/PM type of setup to work correctly, the ghost employee's shift and, therefore, the cash tip, must be entered in the middle of a shift.
Therefore, if your AM shift is 4 AM - 4PM and your PM shift is 4PM - 4 AM, then the shift for the ghost AM employee should be set to 4:01 AM - 3:59 PM so it is inside the schedule and the tips are correctly distributed. If the shift is outside the schedule, the cash tips won't be distributed.
To learn more about tip distribution frequencies and how to set up recurring shifts for ghost employees, click here:
How to See Cash Tips in the Breakdown Page
To see how much your staff have declared in cash tips, you'll need to be in the right view on your Breakdown page and have the column turned on. From the Breakdown page, make sure you're in Breakdown view, not Compact view — cash tip columns only show up in Breakdown view.
The breakdown page contains the following cash-related columns:
Total Cash Tips: The amount the employee reported on their shift before distributions.
Cash Tip Distribution: The amount the employee received solely from cash tip-sharing rules or tip pools.
Cash Take-Home: The total amount of cash the employee keeps after all tip distributions.
💡 Not sure what a column means? Hover over the blue "i" icon next to its name for a quick definition.
Still have questions? Contact our customer success team here or click the Chat icon in the bottom-right corner of your Client Dashboard.