Tip pooling calculator with labor law rules

The idea

Tip pooling is the highest-stakes arithmetic in a restaurant. Managers do it at 1 a.m. in a spreadsheet, and a misapplied role weight or an illegally included manager can turn into a Department of Labor claim or a class action years later. The spreadsheet has no audit trail, no signatures, and no idea what the state rules are.

Payroll suites treat tip pooling as an afterthought and assume their POS integration. The wedge is a standalone calculator that works with a CSV of hours from any system, encodes state-level guardrails so an illegal configuration gets flagged before it happens, and produces a signed paper record per shift. Managers do not pay for convenience here; they pay to be defensible.

Who pays

The buyer is the restaurant owner or GM of an independent or small-group restaurant, at 29 USD/month per location. That is trivially justified against wage-claim exposure. Distribution: restaurant management Facebook groups, r/restaurateur, and content SEO on state-by-state tip pooling rules, which people search constantly and which feeds directly into the product.

MVP scope

• Roster, roles, and role weights per location
• Per-shift pool entry with manual hours or CSV import
• State rule flags that warn or block illegal pool configurations
• Printable per-shift distribution record with signature lines and an immutable audit log
• Skip for v1: POS integrations, payroll export, tip credit calculations, multi-location rollups

Build TipSplit, a web app that computes restaurant tip pools defensibly.
Stack: Next.js (App Router), Supabase for Postgres and auth, Stripe for
billing. Email/password plus magic-link auth.

Core flow: a manager sets up their location once - staff roster, roles
(server, bartender, busser, host, expo), and a weight per role (e.g. server
1.0, busser 0.6). Per shift, the manager enters the total tip pool and each
worker's hours, either typed in or uploaded as a CSV of hours exported from
any POS or scheduler. The app computes each person's share as
(hours x role weight) / sum of all weighted hours x pool, rounded with a
remainder-distribution rule so cents always sum exactly to the pool total.

Guardrails: a state selector loads hard-coded rule flags per US state -
whether managers can share in the pool, whether back-of-house can be
included when no tip credit is taken - and the app blocks or warns on
configurations that violate them.

Pages: shift entry, shift history, staff/roles settings, and a printable
per-shift distribution record with lines for employee signatures. Every
calculation is stored immutably in an audit_log table; edits create a new
version rather than overwriting.

Pricing: 29 USD/month per location via Stripe Checkout, 14-day trial. Keep
the calculator usable on a phone behind the bar.