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server tip refund for MICROS
- Thread starter Micros888
- Start date
TLowder
Programmer
- Mar 20, 2002
- 224
I understand where you're coming from, and agree a little bit, but is that legal? To charge employees expenses you incure while doing business. After all, your employees did not sign a contract with your payment processor. Perhaps you figure this into your pricing and consider it a business expense. Also, do all payment processors charge a fee on CC tips? Probably yes, but I don't ever hear of servers paying the processing fee on credit card tips.
Tom
Tom
Tipping is such a gray area in the business. I haven't seen that done in all my 15+ years and 3 different states.
What I feel that will do is upset the staff, and if they aren't maximizing their monies, then neither will the restaurant. The pennies saved will cost them dimes, I promise. (Unless this is some acceptable standard in some part of the country where all the restaurants are doing it)
They are the face of the restaurant, and if they ain't happy, customers ain't happy, business goes bye-bye. Tell your customer that! I consult when needed and have had to curve many an owner from some tacky form of money-grubbing that will only make things worse.
Should a server tip their busser? Sure. Should they be FORCED to tip a busser a set percentage who is not working on a tippable salary? No. But, they are.
Bo
Remember,
If the women don't find you handsome,
they should at least find you handy.
(Red Green)
What I feel that will do is upset the staff, and if they aren't maximizing their monies, then neither will the restaurant. The pennies saved will cost them dimes, I promise. (Unless this is some acceptable standard in some part of the country where all the restaurants are doing it)
They are the face of the restaurant, and if they ain't happy, customers ain't happy, business goes bye-bye. Tell your customer that! I consult when needed and have had to curve many an owner from some tacky form of money-grubbing that will only make things worse.
Should a server tip their busser? Sure. Should they be FORCED to tip a busser a set percentage who is not working on a tippable salary? No. But, they are.
Bo
Remember,
If the women don't find you handsome,
they should at least find you handy.
(Red Green)
We started doing that years ago. There were some legal questions that came up at the time, but in the end it turned out that it is allowed. I don't like the practice, and argued against it when we put it in place years ago, but CFO trumps MIS. The existing servers didn't complain too much, but most of them are averaging over 22% in tips and know that's pretty good. Bartenders in general don't complain because they do very well and don't want anybody looking too closely at their tip amounts. Since this was implemented, new hires are told about it when they start; they can decide if they want to work with those rules or not.
Enough with the preachy stuff and on to business. This is a tech forum and somebody asked for technical help.
To do this you're going to need a new service charge. This new charge will be assigned to each credit card's Charged Tip link. This is necessary because you don't want to start taking 3% of tips for checks with autogratuities or those closed to gift cards, house accounts, etc...
You're also going to have to figure out how to track the new service charge. You'll have to add the new service charge and edit your report templates. This is different in every Micros system, so figure it out ahead of time. You'll most likely have to make some changes to the report templates too. Make sure you have all this stuff done and ready to go before implementing the changes.
One last thing - make sure the staff knows about the change. They'll be less pissed off if they can prepare for it and you won't have to explain it over and over.
Here are the steps for setting up and implementing the 3% deduction.
[ol]
[li]You already have a Charge Tips set up in Sales|Service Charges. If you're not sure which one it is go to Sales|Tender/Media and click on on of your credit card tenders. Go to the Tender tab and look at the Charged Tip box - that's the service charge you want.[/li]
[li]Go back to the Service Charges setup screen and select that service charge. Hit F5 and then F6 to copy it into a new new service charge.[/li]
[li]Go to the new service charge and name it CC Tips or something similar. On the General tab, enter 97 in the Percent box. When a service charge has a Tips Paid link assigned, the Percent field determines the percentage of the service charge that should post to tips paid.[/li]
[li]At this point you'll want to make your tracking changes [/li]
[li]Open the Tender/Media setup screen and go to the Tender tab. Change the Charged Tip link to your new service charge for any Credit Card that will be retaining the 3%.[/li][/ol]
That's it. Keep an eye on the reports for the first day or two to make sure everything is tracking and posting correctly. Normally the Charged Tips amount will match Tips Paid on the summary at the top of your reports. Once this is in place there will be a difference that will show as Tips Due. This is the amount of CC tips held back. Disregarding any autogratuities, the calculations on the top of the report are:
Service Charge = Charge Tips + CC Tips
Tips Paid = Charge Tips + (CC Tips * .97)
Tips Due = Charge Tips + CC Tips - Tips Paid
These will be taken care of already but it's good to know how they work; somebody is bound to ask.
Pat
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