Daily Tip Declaration
A daily intake where every tipped employee records and attests to the tips they earned, a manager confirms, and the totals roll into a tip-reporting record and payroll - with the 8%-of-receipts allocated-tip check built in.
Employees declare daily tips and attest to them, a manager confirms, and the tool rolls everything into a period total, runs the 8%-of-gross-receipts allocation check, and exports a tip-report CSV plus payroll tip totals.
Before you start
- A free Vercel account
- A free Supabase account
- A free Resend account
- A list of your tipped employees and your daily gross-receipts/sales numbers (a spreadsheet is fine)
The problem this kills
If you run a tipped establishment, tip reporting is a slow-motion headache. Servers scribble tips on the back of a checkout slip, someone keys them into a spreadsheet days later, and at the end of the period nobody is sure who declared what - or whether the totals even hold up against your sales. When the 8%-of-gross-receipts allocation rule comes into play (the IRS "large food or beverage establishment" test that backs Form 8027), you're reconstructing a month of guesses under deadline pressure.
The risk isn't just annoyance. Tips that are under-declared, edited after the fact, or counted twice turn into payroll errors, unhappy staff, and exactly the kind of records you do not want to defend in an audit.
What you'll build
A simple web tool your team logs into every day. Each tipped employee records the tips they received that day and attests to the amount - the digital equivalent of signing for it. Once attested, that declaration is locked. A manager reviews the day's declarations, confirms them, and only then do they roll into the running period total. At period end, the tool compares declared tips against your gross receipts, flags any shift where declared tips fall under 8% of sales (a sign of possible under-reporting), and exports a clean tip-report CSV plus the per-employee payroll tip totals you hand to whoever runs payroll.
What's inside the Implementation Plan
- A guided, copy-paste build you run inside Claude Code - no coding experience required.
- It opens by interviewing you about your business - your roles, your pay periods, how you track sales, your naming conventions, your real edge cases (tip-outs, pooled houses, voids) - so the tool is tailored to how you actually operate, not a generic template you have to bend to fit.
- Step-by-step build prompts you paste one at a time, each one ready to copy.
- The 8%-of-gross-receipts allocated-tip check, wired to the sales numbers you provide.
- Immutable attested declarations, daily manager confirmation, and a duplicate guard keyed on employee + day.
- A "No API yet?" fallback that ingests daily sales from a CSV and exports the tip report and payroll totals in the columns your systems expect - so you can ship this today even with zero integrations.
The governance it includes (this is the point)
- Login so only your team can use the tool.
- Row-level security so each establishment only ever sees its own data - and employees only see their own declarations.
- A complete audit trail: who declared, who attested, who confirmed, and exactly when.
- A human-in-the-loop approval gate: employees and the AI never write final numbers to payroll. The manager confirms each day, and under-threshold allocations are flagged for review before anything rolls up.
- Duplicate guards so the same employee can't be recorded twice for the same day.
- Immutable records: once a declaration is attested, it cannot be quietly edited.
Who it's for
Restaurant managers, bookkeepers, and back-office staff responsible for tip reporting and large-food-establishment compliance - anyone who today is chasing tip numbers across slips and spreadsheets and would rather have one trustworthy daily record.
You've got this. Paste the first prompt and let the plan interview you.