About
Chuck Lager was co-created by Colby Restaurant Group and celebrity chef Fabio Viviani. Colby also operates a range of franchise concepts, including Walk-On’s, Twin Peaks and Red Robin.
Location
Nationwide
Restaurant type
NextGen Casual
Service type
Full service
“Kickfin saves a significant amount of time at the end of the night when you would be trying to dole out cash. And — most importantly — it keeps our servers safer.”
Craig Colby
Owner, Colby Restaurants
Meet Craig.
Or perhaps you already know him: Craig has made a name for himself in the restaurant franchise world. He’s now president of the Colby Restaurant Group, Colby Brands, and Mid-Atlantic Restaurant Concepts. Craig also has a history of successful collaborations with celebrity chef Fabio Viviani — including his latest sports bar concept, Chuck Lager America’s Tavern.
Craig is well-versed in operations to say the least. Over the years, he’s been an early adopter of restaurant innovation, leveraging new restaurant technology to streamline processes and uncover new efficiencies. But even with a top-tier tech stack, the tip-out process remained slow and error-prone — and he hadn’t found a good fix.
In addition to the operational challenges that come with cash management, Craig said nightly cash tip-outs were simply too much of a liability.
“Cash was a nightmare,” Craig said. “We were keeping $10,000 in cash on site. Some of our servers were walking out with $1,000 of cash in their pockets. It wasn’t safe.”
Kickfin cuts the risk
When Craig found out about Kickfin, he thought it could solve for the cash management issues in his restaurants. With no contracts and no setup fees, he realized there was no reason not to give Kickfin a whirl.
His bet paid off. By digitizing the payout process, he cut cash out of the equation completely. Because tips go straight to his employees’ accounts, his servers still got the instant access to funds they needed and deserved.
Craig and his team quickly got his locations up and running with Kickfin. Immediately, they saw changes to their operations, including:
- Less cash on hand — by design: Craig’s team keeps a small amount of petty cash on hand, but there’s no longer a need to bring thousands of dollars onto the premises for payouts.
- Major time savings: Managers no longer have to run to the bank for cash, so they can spend more time on the floor, managing their team and improving the customer experience.
- Reduced risk: Craig used to worry about his people leaving with large sums of cash after a late shift; now, everyone feels safer — and his employees appreciate the fact that he cares about their wellbeing.
“Cash was a nightmare. Kickfin is better for our operations, and our employees feel safe with their tips in the bank.”
Craig Colby
Owner, Colby Restaurants
You might also be interested in
- Product and Company News
For the third year running, Kickfin has been named to the Inc. 5000 — Inc. magazine’s definitive ranking of the fastest-growing private companies in America — earning our place once again among the fastest-growing companies in restaurant and hospitality technology.
Three years on the Inc. 5000 isn’t a lucky streak. It’s a scoreboard — and it says the same thing every year: the industry is moving off cash, and it’s moving to Kickfin.
Restaurants and hospitality groups are walking away from cash tip-outs, spreadsheets, and pay cards — and they’re not looking back.
Growth that’s built on getting operators out of the cash business
Three straight years on this list is the result of one simple idea taking hold across the industry — but the metric we’re proudest of isn’t ours. It’s our customers’.
Operators are trading 3 a.m. bank runs, $10,000 in the safe, and 45 minutes of manual tip math per shift for something that takes seconds. Southern Proper Hospitality went from three to four bank runs a week to one a month. RA Ventures — 55+ locations across three brands — handed managers back the four hours a night they used to lose to counting cash and paperwork, and eliminated bank runs entirely. At one of its concepts, 98% of employees opted into instant payouts the moment they had the choice. That’s not a software win. That’s giving managers their nights back — and employees their money faster.
We hit this ranking through a stretch that tested every operator in the country: labor shortages, rising costs, and razor-thin margins. Kickfin grew because in that environment, cutting hours of admin and eliminating cash risk stopped being a nice-to-have and became survival.
Why operators keep choosing Kickfin
Three things separate us in a category we’ve defined:
Tips go straight to the bank account employees already have. No proprietary card. No transfer fees to touch their own money. No credit checks, no age restrictions, no financial product nobody asked for. Marco’s Pizza chose Kickfin specifically to avoid handing staff a pay card. Rock N’ Roll Sushi eliminated the $1.50-per-shift fee employees were paying just to access their own tips somewhere else.
Tip math is calculated straight from the POS. Toast, Square, Micros, Lightspeed, R365, Union, SkyTab — Kickfin reads the shift data and calculates pools and shares automatically. No exports, no whiteboards, no “trust me, I did the math.”
Every payout is on an auditable digital ledger. Complete history by location, shift, and employee. When it’s time to answer a compliance question, the answer is already there.
The bigger story: this was never just about tips
Here’s what the ranking really signals. What started as the best way to pay out tips has become the disbursement infrastructure the hospitality industry runs money through — POS-native, API-first, and built for 50-state payroll compliance from day one.
Payroll and HCM platforms have noticed. Companies like iSolved, Auris, Adora, Netchex, and AllianceHCM are embedding Kickfin’s API to deliver instant tip and wage disbursement to their own restaurant customers. We’re not a feature bolted onto someone else’s stack — increasingly, we are the stack.
And we’re not slowing down. Something big is coming in early 2027 — the next chapter in how Kickfin moves money for the hospitality industry. We’re not ready to show all of it yet, but if the last three years are any indication, it’s worth watching this space.
The Inc. 5000 measures how fast a company has grown. What it can’t capture is why: we’re building the rails for how the entire hospitality industry pays its people. The tip management category is ours to lead today — and it’s only the beginning of what Kickfin is building.
Thank you — you built this list
Every place on the Inc. 5000 is really thousands of shift-end tip-outs that went off without a hitch, thousands of bank runs that never happened, and thousands of employees who got paid instantly and fairly. That’s on our customers. We owe this ranking to the operators who trusted us with the least glamorous, highest-stakes 20 minutes of their night — and to the teams who show up for them beyond business hours, because restaurants don’t clock out at 5.
We’re honored to be on the 2026 Inc. 5000. We’re more excited about what we’re building next.
See why the fastest-growing restaurants are ditching cash tip-outs for good. Book a demo →
- Product and Company News
2025 was a defining year for Kickfin and the customers who rely on our software to automate their tip management processes
Driven by direct customer feedback and the evolving realities of restaurant operations, our Product Development team delivered a wave of meaningful enhancements across tip calculation, integrations, user controls, and accounting.
Before we look ahead to 2026, here’s a look back at the product advancements that made Kickfin more robust, more flexible, and more ready to meet the demands of restaurant teams than any other tipping solution.
Advanced Tip Calculator Enhancements
n 2025, we significantly expanded the functionality of Kickfin’s Tip Calculator. Here are a few standout features that we released:
Separate Tips and Auto-Gratuities
Kickfin now tracks tips and auto-gratuities separately, allowing operators to report them independently to payroll and manage them differently for tax purposes.
This distinction is especially important in light of the 2025 No Tax on Tips legislation. While tipped employees no longer pay federal income tax on the first $25,000 in tips earned annually, auto-gratuities, service fees, and other compulsory charges remain taxable.
Kickfin ensures those earnings are categorized correctly from the start — reducing downstream payroll and compliance risk.
House Accounts for Service Charges
Not all service charges are distributed 100% to employees — and Kickfin allows you to handle that with “House Accounts.”
Operators can retain a portion of service charges while distributing the remainder to the team. This is particularly valuable for:
- Special events and private dining
- Paying out job roles that don’t typically participate in tip pools (e.g., event managers)
- Maintaining clarity and transparency around service charge allocation
More Flexible Tip Share Logic
No two restaurants share tips the same way — and Kickfin’s calculator now supports even more real-world scenarios.
Operators can configure tip shares:
- By shift or by check close, ensuring support staff are compensated appropriately even if they didn’t touch a specific check
- By hours worked or split evenly, a level of flexibility that remains unique to Kickfin
- With advanced rules for “remaining tips,” allowing operators to define how servers and bartenders split earnings after support positions are paid out.
These enhancements allow Kickfin to support everything from simple pools to highly complex policies.
Check-Level Edits for Greater Accuracy
POS data doesn’t always capture every nuance, so managers may need the ability to make changes.
Kickfin now supports individual check-level edits for:
- Cash tips
- Auto-gratuities
- Check details and splits
This ensures large parties, special events, and edge cases are handled accurately.
Tip Calculator Change Log for Auditability
Any check-level change made by a manager is recorded in a detailed change log. This creates a clear audit trail, helping operators resolve questions quickly and reinforcing transparency and trust with staff.
Enhanced Functionality for Smarter Cash Handling
Thousands of restaurants use Kickfin because they don’t have enough cash on hand to pay out credit card tips, and they want to reduce the amount of cash handling in their restaurant altogether.
However, we know cash will probably always be a (small) part of the equation. Kickfin makes it easy for you to handle that with some added functionality:
- Tips left in cash: If a diner leaves a pile of cash at your table, it might not get recorded in your POS. However, Kickfin allows you to record it and distribute it through our platform.
- Cash payouts: Many operators may want to distribute all of the cash left in their register at the end of a business day to avoid bank runs for deposits. Again, that’s easy to do with Kickfin’s “Blended Payouts” feature.
Enhanced Support for Toast Delivery Service Tips
Kickfin now handles Toast Delivery Service tips more intelligently by excluding driver tips from the general tip pool and assigning those tips directly to the delivery driver. This ensures tips are distributed exactly as intended.
Kickfin delivers on all of those fronts by:
- Freeing managers up from bank runs and the back office, so they can focus on everything that can’t be automated.
- Ensuring employees walk out the door with their earnings already in their existing bank account, no waiting, no detours.
- Helping operators stay compliant, track everything, and uncover new efficiencies.
Expanded POS and Payroll Integrations
New POS Integrations
In 2025, we expanded our POS ecosystem with new integrations including Union POS and rPOWER. POS integrations eliminate manual uploads, reduce errors, and enable real-time tip calculation and reconciliation. Learn more about integrating your POS with Kickfin.
New Payroll Integrations
We also launched new payroll integrations with ADP Run, Paylocity, and Restaurant365 Payroll.
Once activated, Kickfin generates export files that sync seamlessly with your payroll system — significantly reducing manual work for payroll teams.
Looking Ahead
platform that keeps pace with the ever-changing complexity of modern hospitality operations.
If you’re not yet using Kickfin, now is the time to see what advanced tip management really looks like 👉 Schedule a demo today!
If you’re already a Kickfin customer, our team is happy to walk you through what’s new. 👉 Schedule a quick consult to learn more.
And of course: Stay tuned for what’s to come in 2026!
- Product and Company News
Kickfin is proud to announce that we have once again been named to the 2025 Deloitte Technology Fast 500™, a ranking of the fastest-growing technology, media, telecommunications, life sciences, fintech, and energy tech companies in North America, now in its 31st year.
Kickfin is the only company on the list purpose-built for restaurants and bars to automate tip management — marking another major milestone for our team, our partners and the thousands of restaurant operators who trust us to modernize their tip-pooling and payout workflows.
Why it matters
When it comes to tipping out employees, cash is no longer king — and needs are changing fast. Hospitality workers demand (and deserve!) faster, cashless payouts; burned-out managers need more hours in their day; and now more than ever, operators care about visibility, compliance, and employee satisfaction.
Kickfin delivers on all of those fronts by:
- Freeing managers up from bank runs and the back office, so they can focus on everything that can’t be automated.
- Ensuring employees walk out the door with their earnings already in their existing bank account, no waiting, no detours.
- Helping operators stay compliant, track everything, and uncover new efficiencies.
What sets Kickfin apart
There’s a reason Kickfin is the best-in-class tip management solution.
- Broader POS integrations: We’ve expanded our direct integrations with leading POS brands, including Toast, Square, SkyTab, Genius POS, Union, and more — so managers can pool and pay out tips in a matter of clicks.
- Enhanced tip-pool logic and flexibility: Our platform automates even the complex tip pool policies, with more tip pooling and automated reconciliation features than any other solution, while keeping the end-user experience simple and intuitive.
- Instant, cashless payouts: With fewer cash drawer runs and real time bank deposits, teams experience faster shift-close, fewer errors and improved satisfaction.
- Built-in compliance and reporting: As tip-pooling regulations continue to evolve, Kickfin empowers customers with robust features like digital paper trails and payroll integrations to ensure accuracy and compliance from end to end.
- Customer success focus: Our fully U.S.-based Customer Success team is partners with customers to make onboarding fast and easy, no matter how tricky your tip policy may be, so you get ROI right away.
A big thank you
We’re honored to be recognized by Deloitte, and even more excited about what comes next. For restaurant operators, managers and employees alike, the future of tip management is here, and we’re thrilled to be your partner.
Ready to see what automated tip pooling and instant payouts look like in action? Book a demo today!
- Product and Company News, Technology and Software
Brand new feature, coming in hot!
As part of our latest product release, Kickfin now offers Blended Payouts for even easier, fully automated tip management and reconciliation.
Why Blended Payouts Matter
Now more than ever, restaurant guests use credit cards or digital payment methods instead of cash. For many operators, that means there isn’t enough cash on hand at the end of a shift to pay out tips. But employees still want to receive their payouts immediately after clock-out.
As our customers know, Kickfin solves for those cash shortages by automating and digitizing the payout process — giving you the power to send instant, cashless payouts directly to your employees’ bank of choice, 24/7/365.
The result: minimal cash handling and risk, better accuracy and tracking — and of course, fewer bank runs.
However, digitizing payouts often results in some leftover cash in the drawer. Over time, we’ve heard from customers who prefer to use up that cash to pay out tips, then distribute the remaining tip amounts via Kickfin.
With Blended Payouts, you can do just that — and still account for every penny paid out, quickly and accurately, within the Kickfin platform.
How Blended Payouts Work
As always, all Kickfin customers can still choose to split individual payment amounts between instant payouts and payroll. Once you enable the new Cash Payouts feature, you will now be able to account for any cash tip payments that were also distributed.
Note: This feature lives within Kickfin’s Tip Calculator, which means you must have an active POS integration to use it.
- Once it’s enabled, you’ll see the new “Cash Payouts” button on the Payment Review screen.
- After clicking the button, users will be able to enter the individual cash amounts that were distributed to employees.
- Back on the Review screen, you’ll see instant payout, payroll, and cash payment amounts for each employee. All three payment methods will have their own line items and be accounted for under your Payment Details.
Watch here for a full walkthrough of the new feature.
Ready to enable Blended Payouts?
If you’re a current customer, in touch with our Customer Success team at support@kickfin.com to activate this new feature.
(Not a customer yet? Click here to see Kickfin in action and learn how you can automate tip pooling and payouts!)
See Kickfin in action!
- No contracts or setup fees
- Implement overnight
- 24/7 customer support
