Tip Credit & Minimum-Wage Top-Up Checker

The problem this kills

In a tip-credit state, you're allowed to pay tipped staff a lower cash wage because tips are supposed to make up the difference. But the law puts the risk on you, the employer: if a server's cash wage plus tips doesn't reach the full minimum wage for the hours they worked, you owe them the gap. Miss it and you're not just behind on one paycheck — you're exposed to back-wage claims, penalties, and a Department of Labor audit that goes back years.

The math is deceptively fiddly. You have to separate tipped hours from side-work hours, apply overtime against the full minimum wage rather than the tipped rate, handle different minimum wages by jurisdiction, and do it per employee, per pay period, every single run. Most shops "check it in their head" or trust the payroll software's defaults — and quietly underpay people for months.

This tool does the arithmetic the same way every time, shows its work, and refuses to let a shortfall slip through unnoticed.

What you'll build

A small, private web app that only your team can log into. You import a pay period's hours, tipped cash wage rates, and tips received — from your existing spreadsheet or a CSV export. The tool computes each tipped employee's effective hourly rate (cash wage + tips ÷ hours), compares it to the minimum wage that applies to their jurisdiction and hours, and flags everyone who came up short. For each shortfall it calculates the exact make-up pay you owe. A payroll reviewer eyeballs each top-up, approves it, and the tool exports a clean make-up-pay CSV in the columns your payroll system expects.

What's inside the Implementation Plan

• A discovery interview, first. Before it builds anything, the plan has the AI agent interview you about your business — your pay periods, how you track tipped vs. side-work hours, your jurisdictions and their minimum wages, your overtime rules, your employee and pay-code naming, and your messy edge cases. It reflects a short tailored spec back to you for a thumbs-up, so the tool fits how your shop actually runs instead of a generic template.
• A copy-paste prompt for every build step — you never have to write code.
• A data model tuned to your field names and pay codes.
• The full top-up calculation: effective hourly, jurisdiction minimum, tipped vs. non-tipped hours, and overtime computed on the full minimum wage.
• A reviewer approval screen and a make-up-pay CSV export.
• A "No API yet?" fallback so you can build and use the whole thing today off a CSV — no payroll integration needed.

The governance it includes (this is the point)

This isn't a throwaway script. The plan bakes in the controls that make a payroll tool trustworthy:

• Login so only your team can open it.
• Row-level security so each business only ever sees its own employees and pay periods.
• A complete audit trail — who imported what, who approved which top-up, and exactly when.
• A hard human-in-the-loop approval gate — the tool drafts the make-up pay; a payroll reviewer confirms each calculation, and only an approved top-up can be exported into the run.
• Duplicate guards so the same employee-and-period can't be imported or paid twice.

Who it's for

Restaurant payroll managers, bookkeepers, and owner-operators in tip-credit states who are responsible for guaranteeing that tipped staff reach minimum wage every pay period — and who'd rather catch a shortfall on their own screen than in a wage claim.

You've got this — paste the first prompt and let the agent interview you.