Unallocated Tips report

[TivoliBowl]

Lot of relevant back-info:

1) So, we are one of the bowling centers that started with the QubicaAMF integration.  We are for some silly reason set up as Square for retail, though, we do F&B business in almost every bowling center ever created.  And Square for Restaurants seems a much more appropriate fit for all we do.

2) That aside, apparently as our account is owned by our parent company's CEO, and was created by our parent company's IT person, they both marked themselves appropriately as unable to receive tips.  And as we are simply running bowling, F&B transactions, room rentals, etc, we are able and eligible to collect tips (not myself as GM but in general, every employee at a POS).  

3) Because of the way the system was set up, for some transactions (but not all?) tips are being unallocated, because "the person who rang it up is unable to accept tips".  I guarantee our IT guy and CEO are not behind the POS and ringing up guests.

4) THERE IS NO WAY TO RUN TIP REPORTS.

5) MOST IMPORTANTLY, NO ONE NOTIFIES YOU THAT YOU HAVE UNALLOCATED TIPS.  We have no idea for how long this has been happening, and now we are legally liable for all those tips that the company has collected that should have gone to our employees.  We WANT to pay them out.

So all that said, here's my question, more specifically pointed at Square employees and Qubica centers that have integrated with Square for their POS terminals:

How can I, without literally viewing every individual transaction, see a full reporting of all tips received, with indications of which tips were marked as unallocated, from the beginning of our integration with Square?  

I need to reconcile this, and there seems to be no method within the system to do so.  We do not use Square for payroll.  We do not use Square for shift scheduling.  We are not interested in doing either of those things. 

We were sold this system as a cheaper and more user-friendly system as a means to accept card payments, as a payment processor, and the added feature of being able to use the terminals in a mobile fashion.

This is NOT what is happening, as the backend system is making decisions on tips that it shouldn't be allowed to make without my intervention, and not even disclosing that it did it until you dig into the transaction details on individual transactions.

[TheRealChipA]

Hey there @TivoliBowl.

Thank you for the detail of your post, as it did stop me from going down paths that would have been dead ends.  It greatly helped to know that you don’t use Square Scheduling and Square Payroll.  I’m not sure why, in your case, unallocated tips are happening.  But I have a few guesses.

1. Do you have an online store that is used for any purpose — say for F&B or for reserving lanes/shoes, etc?  If so, can customers tip when paying in that online store?
2. Other that the IT person and owner, are there any employee who are not tip eligible who might be sometimes on their own?  It could be as simple as a non-tip-eligible manger ringing up a sale because a tip-eligible employee was late, or called out sick.

Either of these cases would result in unallocated tips, and that can’t be fixed.  

Now, I’m assuming that you at least have employees clock in and out with their own codes on your Square POS.  As such, there is a report that you can run daily (or by shift, or whatever is the appropriate tip period in your shop).  This report is located in your online dashboard main menu > Staff & Scheduling > Time Tracking > Timecards.  When you run this report for any period, if there are unattributed tips, they will be listed at the bottom as such.  You can then manually redistribute those tips to the appropriate employees when you run you payroll however you do so.

Also, as far as history goes, you can run this report for the past year, or 6 months, or whatever period you have been with Square.  Obviously depending on your tipping situation (do you pool, are tips given to the person who rang them in, etc) you may need to run many reports.  But you can come up with the amount that needs to be correct with your employees.  

No doubt this will be somewhat painful when correcting the past if you have been with Square for a long period of time.  But hopefully, you caught it quickly and can correct history, followed by running this report daily to highlight unattributed tips when they happen.

I know this is a very general reply to your post.  If you have questions, or need more instruction, please let me know. 

[TivoliBowl]

Chip, thanks.  Unfortunately, because the way the QubicaAMF integration is set up, we do NOT have employees log into the terminals.  They log in through Conqueror, which is QubicaAMF's way of running a bowling center.  The only people on the account for square are myself (General Manager), our IT guy who helped set us up with Max Bloink, and our owner and CEO who is the owner of the account.  I am and the IT guy are "authorized users" but no staff is set up on the system.  

That's what's so frustrating, is that as the venture into this integration is still fairly new (I think we transitioned in August of last year) there's ZERO documentation for it.  Conqueror says to contact Square.  Square says it's likely some communication issue with Conqueror.  It's a runaround no matter how I move forward.  All I want to do is pay my employees what they deserve!  

So I genuinely don't know how it interprets some payments of tips as "valid" and assigned to folks who can accept tips and some as not.  What's weird is the same people will get some tips and sometimes won't.  Same shift.  No changes in the login in Conqueror.  It just seems like a bug somewhere.

So I have no way of doing the staff reporting, because again, we don't do timecards or even login to the terminals.  It's set up through a device code (we have two terminals acting as essentially just card readers, that's it) to tie into the Conqueror system.  We don't even itemize the inventory through it.  Conqueror sends it a total to collect via card, and the terminal requests it from the guest, and offers if they'd like to tip.  That's the entire process for the Square front-end, and on the back end, I can get all transactions, and can find the individual items and show that the tips are unallocated, but no way to get a full report.  I can get "how much in tips" we received in a given period, but no way to determine what was allocated and what was not, without getting into literally each transaction's details.  Which I am loathe to do starting back in August.  (I will, if that's what's necessary, but since the data is here, I can only assume it's a matter of programming to make that detail possible in a historic report.)

[TheRealChipA · Accepted solution]

@TivoliBowlIt will come as no surprise to you to read that we have hit the limits of how I (or anyone here in the Seller Community) can assist you.  Since an integration is involved, your issues can only be resolved between your IT folks and the appropriate Square development teams.  It is clear there is something errant in the integration.  I’d love to be able to help you resolve the historical tip allocation issue, but since you are (in effect) using Square in a way that it wasn’t designed to be used as far as tip allocation goes, I can’t find a way to do that.  I’ve gone down a few paths in my head this morning over coffee and each one leads me to a cliff.

I will suggest one thing to you, however, and hope that it can be helpful.  It is the only path I went down that had promise before I hit a wall.  First, I’m sure you are aware that the Square Transactions CSV (Dashboard > Reporting > Transactions) includes tips for all transactions.  However, the critical piece that is missing is how those tips were allocated.  It is very obvious that this information is available in Square since if you manually look at a transaction in the dashboard you can see whether or not a tip is attributed.  It should be possible for your IT person to push the Square team to give them visibility into that so that you could, at least, download that CSV and massage it in a spreadsheet.  But, of course, I’m only guessing here and can’t speak for Square.  It just seems logical to me.

I’m sorry that I can’t help you here. It sounds like you are the “victim” of a poor planning and implementation process here, one that is too big for us mere mortals to address or fix.  I wish you the best for some sort of resolution soon.

[TivoliBowl]

Chip, you are and shall forever be, my friend.  🙂  

I appreciate you and your sincere efforts.  I agree entirely.  As I stated in the introduction, this is mainly aimed at square people and others who are in the same integration.  (We're a lonely bunch.)  But again, greatly greatly appreciate your efforts.  You're a good person, and we need more like you in the world!

That said, anyone in the QubicaAMF integration...HALP! 😉