Toast-Kickfin Integration “Changes Everything” for HOBNOB

Meet Jeff. 

Jeff Sime, HOBNOB’s Director of Operations, manages growth and day-to-day operations at the Atlanta-based restaurant group. 

HOBNOB began as a family-owned restaurant with a focus on upscale tavern fare made with regionally sourced ingredients. It quickly expanded to six locations throughout the Atlanta metro area. Their regulars stop in to sample a wide range of bourbons, watch the big game, or catch up with friends at weekend brunch. 

Cash problems come to a head  

In HOBNOB’s early years, managers hand-wrote checks to pay servers and bartenders for their tips every single night. With their fast growth, this quickly became unsustainable, so they turned to cash tip-outs. 

Of course, cash came with its own set of challenges — including time-consuming bank runs, risk of theft and human error, and tracking and reporting issues (just to name a few).

With more than 250 tipped employees, managers were spending at least an hour per shift, at every location on trip distribution, which required updating spreadsheets, manually calculating tips, and counting out cash. Across the entire organization, over 12 hours were lost daily to tip management. 

But inefficiency wasn’t the only problem; managers were frustrated with the administrative burden that constantly pulled them off the floor — where they were needed — in order to crunch numbers and count cash. As hospitality pros, they much preferred to be interacting with guests and supporting their staff.

Kickfin to the rescue

HOBNOB’s co-owner and business director, Becky Yeremyan, began researching ways to eliminate cash when she saw how inefficient cash tip outs were becoming. Becky was drawn to Kickfin because it was designed specifically for restaurants, with restaurant operators’ needs in mind. 

HOBNOB initially launched Kickfin unintegrated to automate the payout process. They immediately reaped the benefits of instant, cashless payouts, sent directly to their employees’ bank of choice.

But activating the Kickfin-Toast POS integration took their newfound efficiencies to the next level, completely automating the tip pooling process.

Kickfin x Toast: POS integration features that “just make sense”

HOBNOB built their unique tip pooling policy in the Kickfin platform, eliminating the need for spreadsheets entirely. 

Implementation was fast and smooth, with easy access to Kickfin’s customer support team whenever a question arose. 

“Kickfin provided gold star customer service. I don’t know if we’ve ever had this level of customer service from a software company before,” Jeff said.

Having digitized their tip distribution process, HOBNOB identified an opportunity to make tip pools more equitable. Previously, HOBNOB servers tipped out every person who worked in a support role at any point during their shift  because it was too complex to account for time worked. (For example, the busser who got cut two hours before close was still collecting their share of all tips earned throughout the shift.)

Using the “time-worked” feature of the tip calculator, HOBNOB now splits tip outs based on when a check is processed — so servers are only tipping out a busser for the hours that they were cleaning tables, not for the whole shift. 

The change in compensation is majorly boosting morale. “What we’re doing now is a lot more efficient, and people are happier to tip the people who are helping them — not people who were gone for most of the shift,” says Jeff.

The bottom line 

For HOBNOB, distributing tips with Kickfin is paying off in spades: 

• Managers run checkouts with just a few keystrokes
• Ownership feels better protected from fraud 
• Servers, owners, and managers have instant access to accurate tip data
• Servers feel safer carrying less cash after shifts 
• Tip distribution is more equitable for all tipped employees