Meet Bill. 

Bill Blackburn is a veteran of the restaurant industry and co-owner of the Homegrown Restaurant Group based out of Alexandria, Virginia. At one of their locations, they’re operating three different concepts out of the same BOH. Under the same liquor license and one set of books, you can find Pork Barrel Barbecue, Holy Cow (a fast casual burger joint), and rotating pop up cocktail bars. With three sets of employees and three types of service falling under one financial umbrella, streamlining operations and accounting isn’t easy — and cash was adding to the complexity.

“It was just a cash management nightmare.”

Cash hasn’t always been this much of a hassle. But with very few customers paying in cash these days, Bill noticed that most nights, they owed way more cash to their servers than they had on hand 

“It’s problematic to continue paying out servers and bartenders the old way, with cash at the end of every shift. But it’s a mainstay of the industry to expect to walk away with your tips every night.”

In recent years, managers had begun spending an inordinate amount of time counting piles of cash, counting down safes, or ensuring tips were delivered to servers. And with no record of the cash being paid out, Homegrown Restaurant Group had little recourse to deal with tip discrepancies and disputes.  

Non-negotiables 

Bill and his team knew they were ready to move past cash tips at the Pork Barrel concepts, but they weren’t sure what that would look like. At one of their other restaurants, their servers were receiving all of their tips on payroll bi-weekly. But they also recognized that one of the big benefits of working at Pork Barrel is leaving with cash in your pocket every night. 

“We started looking for what we were calling a ‘Venmo for restaurants’.”

Bill and his team asked their industry partners if they had any leads on a solid digital tipping solution that would have the same benefits as cash without all of the risk. Their U.S Foods rep was familiar with Kickfin and recommended that they give it a try — and Bill felt it was an immediate fit. 

One feature that Bill loved about Kickfin was the immediate payouts: As a former bartender himself, he remembers how great it felt to walk home with money in his pocket. Kickfin takes it one step further by putting the money directly in his employees’ bank accounts, where it’s instantly available and ready to use, 24/7, 365.

Kickfin for employees 

Getting buy-in from your team is one of the most important steps to implementing a new process. Bill presented Kickfin’s cashless tipping system to his employees and gave them the option of using Kickfin or putting their tips on payroll. 

The team embraced Kickfin — and now, servers and managers alike feel confident in their tip outs thanks to Kickfin’s robust, easy-to-use payment tracking. Now, if questions or disputes pop up, managers can reference Kickfin’s digital paper trail to see that the correct amount was paid out and when it was sent. 

Payroll benefits 

Bill’s team especially appreciates Kickfin when it’s time to run payroll. Rather than relying on a spreadsheet to track tips for the pay period (where it’s very easy to make a mistake), managers can run their Kickfin report to see how much each server earned and easily navigate between gross tips, net tips and other views to assist in reporting. 

Meet Christina.

As Director of Human Relations for all of the Georgia franchise Rock N’ Roll Sushi restaurants, Christina wears many hats. Between recruiting, onboarding, and tip distribution to over 80 employees, she basically has a hand in everything HR.

Trying out cashless tipping

At Rock N’ Roll Sushi, we’ve always been cashless. Originally, we paid tips on payroll, but we were looking for a more streamlined option. We started working with a different cashless tipping platform, which wasn’t bad, but it wasn’t as user-friendly nor as streamlined as Kickfin. We had to issue Visa cards to all of our employees, which made things pretty complicated for them. They had to move money around and pay fees to get the tips into their bank accounts to pay bills. 

We weren’t looking to switch from our pay card provider and were kind of complacent when it came to our tip program at the time. We didn’t even realize there could be an easier process, but once we found out about Kickfin, there was no question about switching over. 

We found out that corporate Rock N’ Roll Sushi locations were using Kickfin, so we started looking into it. We checked out an info session and spoke with a few people at Kickfin to dig in deeper. We ultimately decided to make the switch—which went so smoothly. The transition was so effortless with no residual issues or anything like that. 

Administrative issues

One thing that really stood out to me was the ease of adding new employees. When we had a new employee ready to get on the floor and start earning tips, we had to set them up with a new tip card, upload their ID, and have them activate their account. We may not have had cards in stock or run into other issues, so sometimes this process could take up to two weeks, which not only left them without pay but also created a frustrating administrative process. 

If a new employee had gone two weeks without activating their tips cards, we would have to go back at that point and look at their tip earnings and input each day’s tips into their account. Now, I can send new employees a Kickfin invite and start inputting their tips immediately. If for some reason that employee doesn’t get around to activating their account for a few weeks, the money is sitting in a sort of limbo account, ready for them to access. I no longer have to parse through 14 days of tip-out reports and can just run my normal tip-out distribution process instead.

I went over everything with my managers and explained to them how much more efficient Kickfin would be, both for the company and for employees. That’s easy to say since it’s saving them time and money too. Using tip cards, employees were charged $1.50 per transfer to their tip card, and from there, they’d be hit with ATM fees or fees to transfer tips into their bank accounts. With Kickfin, they’re saving at least a dollar if not more each shift, which meets our goal of keeping more money in employees’ pockets. Everyone loves it.  

It was really simple because I’m the only one who pays out tips. Our managers don’t have to worry about it at all. With the tipped employees, we had no issues either. We just send them the invite via text or email, and it takes only about a minute to set up their accounts. And then boom, they have tips going straight to their bank accounts. We had really no issues and no complaints. 

Visibility into tipping

One of the biggest benefits of switching to Kickfin is that we don’t have employees questioning their money or worrying about when their tip cards will be ready. Once they’re set up, they’re confident knowing that money is going to just flow into their accounts. Before, there would be a lot of confusion about the tip cards and visibility, but now we don’t even have technical issues enrolling people with Kickfin.  

We do mention it when recruiting because one of the first things servers will ask is how they’ll be paid. It’s a determining factor for a lot of people in the service industry, whether they’re paid in cash daily, on payroll, or digitally. Servers don’t care about the hourly rate because tips are how they really make a living. It helps us sell them on working at Rock N’ Roll when we tell them their tips will go directly to their bank accounts after each shift. 

Money & time saved

Another huge plus for me was the amount of time I saved. With our previous gratuity management platform, I had to manually enter each employee’s tip amount for the day. It was time-consuming, but also nerve-wracking. God forbid, I’m off by a line and pay tips to the wrong person, so I was constantly double and triple-checking my work. Now, I can upload a spreadsheet to Kickfin, which not only cuts down on mistakes but also the time it takes me to input tips. It went from three or four hours of work down to now about an hour and a half to input tips for all seven locations. 

On a company level, Kickfin has also made a huge difference in our cash flows. Before switching to Kickfin, we would have to deposit funds into our float account on a weekly basis for all of our locations, which could mean a $40,000 withdrawal every Monday, because it’s hard to anticipate how much we’ll need to tip out each week. Some locations are busier than others, and obviously, some weeks are busier, too. Some weeks we’d have to reach out and ask them not to replenish the account because we still had too much sitting there. Other times, the float account would be empty by the time the weekend rolled around, so employees would have to wait until our account was replenished to access their tips. 

Now with Kickfin, we pay out our tips, and then our float account replenishes every single day to bring us back up to $5,000. We never have to worry about having enough (or too much) money sitting in the float account and we don’t have to make huge cash allotments to pay our workers as we balance the budget. I don’t even look at our float account anymore because I know I don’t have to worry about it. 

The transition team

When you’re making a big transition to a new platform, you always have fears and ask yourself, “Is this going to screw everything up? Am I going to have technical difficulties?” And I take it seriously because this is our employees’ livelihood, so you want it to go as smoothly as possible to not interfere with their pay. I normally would have been more stressed, but they would get back to me even with the silliest questions. We had a location that wasn’t quite open yet during our transition, but it would be ready very soon. We had a direct line of contact about this location, and basically, the Customer Success team just needed to know when we’d want the funds. We reached out once it was ready, and just like that, we were able to pull funds and pay employees. I’ve been more than satisfied with the service from Kickfin. 

The bottom line. 

Meet Jodi.

Jodi Skaff is the Director of Finance for North High Brewing Company, which has expanded from its original Columbus brewery to include six other brewpubs in Ohio and Indiana. Jodi’s oversight of NHB’s finances has made it possible to scale the business quite rapidly — with five locations opening in the past year and three more on the way. 

As an early addition to the craft beer scene in central Ohio, North High has built a reputation for good beer and classic, midwestern-style menus. At all of the many NHB locations, they exclusively serve North High beer alongside favorites like fried pickles and buffalo cauliflower chunks.

Disappearing tips

Before adopting Kickfin, NHB tipped out their 50 employees in cash – and the disorganization was costing them. With that much cash floating around, mistakes are bound to happen, and NHB was losing money every week. 

Jodi noticed the discrepancies in credit card tips and cash tips, but there was no way to recoup the losses and no accountability. “I think for restaurants, tipping poses one of the biggest risks for money to just disappear,” she said. “You pay someone too much cash and it’s gone. There’s no way to really trace it after that.”

Balancing the books with Kickfin

Jodi has her hands full with keeping seven brewpubs’ finances afloat, and missing money was making it even harder. When North High made the switch to Kickfin’s cashless tip distribution, she said the nightmare was over. “It was pretty much a no-brainer because dealing with cash from an accounting and finance standpoint was a nightmare,” she said. “I always struggled to balance the books and they would never match up. And now it’s a very cut and dry system.”

Not only was Jodi happier with the added accountability, her managers and employees bought into the system, too. Instead of having to come in person to collect tips, employees count on Kickfin to deliver their pay on a regular basis without interrupting their days off.

Jodi says the managers like the system because they no longer have to deal with her. “It’s less frustrating for managers because I’m not coming at them asking why money is missing anymore,” she said.

Scaling their restaurant

As North High grew, the company needed to quickly set up gratuity management systems at each new location. Jodi relied heavily on Derek from the Kickfin team to implement the platform throughout their expansion. “We’ve opened five locations in just the past year and it’s been very simple to just let him know we have a new location and he’s on it,” Jodi said. “He’s great, especially because half the time I’m reaching out last minute and need to get things set up and he just makes it happen.”

Not only has Kickfin supported North High’s expansion, but it also makes it easier to switch employees between locations, and hire new employees–especially now that they have 253 tipped employees. According to Jodi, the system is straightforward and easy for employees to get behind. “It’s so user-friendly for everyone, and I never really get questions about how to use it,” said Jodi.

While cashless tipping didn’t directly cause NHB’s rapid growth, using Kickin has certainly made it easier to scale. According to Jodi, “Balancing the books plays a huge role in our ability to expand. If you’re not super organized and keeping finances in check, you can’t expand as quickly as we have.” Going cashless has made finances much clearer for NHB, ultimately growing their confidence in their business and continuing to grow.

The bottom line