Hey Dave! 👋
We don’t use Open Tickets or the Square Terminal for this — we run everything through Square Appointments, and it handles this automatically for us.
Here’s how ours works step-by-step:
✅ How We Do It (Square Appointments Setup)
Each nail tech has:
Their own login
Their own color
Their own calendar
When a client books multiple services (ex: manicure + pedicure), each service is assigned to the specific tech performing it.
At checkout, whichever tech is finishing last checks the client out through the Appointments app.
When the client leaves a tip:
🔹 Square automatically splits the tip based on the value of the services each tech performed.
🔹 It attaches the correct portion of the tip to each employee’s reporting.
🔹 No manual math. No spreadsheets needed to split tips.
Example of How It Splits
Square automatically allocates:
Which is fair because the split follows service revenue percentage.
Why This Helps With W-2 Reporting
Because the tip is tied to the individual employee inside Square:
It flows correctly into reporting.
It shows up properly in payroll.
No need to manually reallocate pooled tips.
Makes W-2 prep much cleaner at year-end.
If you’re using Square Terminal with Open Tickets, the limitation is that Terminal doesn’t allocate tips proportionally per service provider the same way Appointments does. The key is having each service assigned to a specific staff member inside the transaction before checkout.
If switching fully to Square Appointments is an option for your workflow, that may solve your issue without having to build manual spreadsheets.
Hope this helps! 😊
