Success Stories
Mellow Mushroom Franchise Uses Kickfin as Cashless Alternative for Tipping
Pizza | Franchise
About the franchisee
Hot Pies Incorporated serves stone-baked pizza as a franchisee of the Mellow Mushroom brand.
Location
Daphne, Enterprise and Foley, Alabama
Restaurant type
Pizza
Service type
Full-service restaurant/FSR
“In a decision between immediate money or a check, I would always choose immediate money. That’s what Kickfin delivers to our staff.”
Ashley Weeks
Operations Manager,
Hot Pies Inc.
Meet Ashley.
Ashley Weeks is the operations manager for Hot Pies Incorporated, a franchise operator of three Mellow Mushroom pizzerias in Alabama. Between their Daphne, Enterprise and Foley restaurants, Ashley works with roughly 150 employees, a notable percentage of whom receive tipped income.
As more customers use credit cards to pay for their pizza, the company struggles to keep enough cash on hand to tip out. Even though they increased the amount kept in the cash-on-hand drawer, there is still a need for at least one midday bank run.
The tipping point — pun intended — came when the franchise owner went on a well-deserved vacation. Unfortunately, he was the only one with access to the company bank accounts, and one of the restaurants had a negative cash flow day. Hot Pies pulled together and made it work operationally, but the race was on to find a cashless tipping alternative. No one wanted to go through that again.
Why Kickfin?
Hot Pies is committed to compensating its hard-working team members as quickly as possible, so finding an alternative to cash that would still be immediately available was crucial. Paying out through ACH or putting tips on payroll are just not timely enough.
Also, they want a solution that can work across all three locations and the delay inherent to a check-based option will seriously hinder their ability to staff up for the summer season, a huge deal for the Foley location.
Kickfin met all of Ashley’s three primary criteria:
- Immediacy: Tips are now automatically deposited directly into employees’ bank accounts right away. Bonus: They were able to add their cooks into Kickfin to tip out on catering orders.
- Eliminate the “constant” bank runs: Hot Pies does not have to get cash daily to pay out their servers anymore, and it’s safer for everyone to not have so much cash on hand.
- Easy to use: “The interface is super user friendly. It’s easy to operate at work and the managers haven’t had any problems using it daily.”
“Kickfin is so useful — and it saves me a trip to the bank. It’s a wonderful solution.”
Ashley Weeks
Operations Manager,
Hot Pies Inc.
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