Calculating tip pool hour shares from clock-in data

Tip pool math varies by state, by ordinance, by union contract, and by your own internal policy. We deliberately don't try to compute it for you. What we do give you is the precise per-station, per-person hours data that most tip-pool methods need as their input.

The data you get out of Kangaroo Clock

If your servers and back-of-house staff have been clocking in with station tags (see the FOH-vs-kitchen split spoke), the CSV export has every shift with the station tag attached. From that, you can pull:

• Total hours per station for any date range
• Per-person hours within a station for any date range
• The hour share each individual server vs. cook vs. busser worked relative to the total tipped staff hours for that period

That hour share is what most tip-pool methods multiply by the pooled tip amount to get each person's distribution.

What we don't do

We don't compute wage rates, tip percentages, or tip distribution amounts. Two reasons. One: the rules differ enough by jurisdiction that any calculator we shipped would be wrong somewhere. Two: tip-pool math is something the manager-on-duty or the bookkeeper should understand and own, not something a time-tracking app should automate behind the scenes.

The CSV export gives you the per-station, per-person hours; you (or your bookkeeper) run the rest in whatever spreadsheet or payroll tool already handles it.

Back to the restaurants hub, or the decimal/HH:MM hours converter if your tip-pool spreadsheet expects decimal hours.