Not affiliated with, endorsed by, or sponsored by any point-of-sale, payroll, or restaurant-management product. This page compares the free calculator against the most common way tip-pooling eligibility actually gets decided at a small restaurant or bar: out loud, in a shift or staff meeting, with nobody writing the rule down.
A staff meeting can settle who wants to be in the pool. It has no way to check that against a federal rule that most owners have never seen written down as two separate tests: managers and supervisors are never eligible, full stop, and back-of-house staff are eligible only when no tip credit is taken. Those two rules get confused for one rule constantly — "the manager helped bus tables, so it's fine" is exactly the sentence a staff meeting produces and the FLSA does not accept.
Same roster, run both ways: servers and bartenders front-of-house, dishwashers back-of-house, and a shift manager, with a $5.12 tip credit taken.
| Staff meeting | This calculator | |
|---|---|---|
| Checks the manager against the rule? | Only if someone in the room remembers the 2018 amendment | Every time, automatically |
| Checks back-of-house against the tip-credit election? | Rarely — "everyone splits it" is the default | Every time, automatically |
| Front-of-house hours actually pooled | Not computed | 230 hrs/week |
| Weekly back-wage exposure if the pool is invalid | Not computed | $1,177.60 |
| Exposure across four weeks | Not computed | $4,710.40 |
| Leaves a record you can hand a bookkeeper | No — whoever was in the room remembers it differently by next quarter | Yes — a link that reopens the exact roster |
The staff meeting is not wrong to exist — someone still has to decide who is on shift and who gets a cut. What it cannot do on its own is the rule check, because the rule has two independent branches and a room full of people focused on schedules is not where that gets caught.