Dive Brief:

• 7shifts, a provider of management software for foodservice operations, has released tip pooling software designed to streamline distribution of tips among employees.
• The company designed the tool with input from restaurant clients. Brent Beatty, senior director of product for 7shifts, said the company's tip pooling program could save hours of work for restaurant managers and has received positive responses from customers since the launch of the tool. 
• Earlier this year, 7shifts secured $21.5 million in funding from Union Square Hospitality Group. USHG CEO Danny Meyer has vocally supported tip pooling as a way to equalize pay between the front and back of house.

Dive Insight:

7shifts says its tip pooling program is designed to speed up the calculation and distribution of tips by connecting with restaurants' POS systems. 

"It reduces manual data entry," Beatty said of 7shifts' tip pooling tool. "Pulls some information from your POS, and obviously from your business, with a custom set of rules and then spits out a report on the other end that tells you who should receive what."

Because different states have different rules on tip pooling, 7shifts offers restaurants the ability to design their own tip pools based on local regulations. Beatty said this feature, along with the program's connection to POS and other restaurant systems, would increase transparency for employees.

The company says its tip pooling solution reduces the need for managers to spend hours entering tip data by hand.

"The less time you spend in the back office in a spreadsheet, the more time managers can go out, run the floor or serve their customers," Beatty said. 

Meyer argued in a popular LinkedIn post that tip pooling can reduce pay inequality between different restaurant teams, especially when the front of house pulls in a lot of tips. 

But tip pooling isn't necessarily a perfect solution to pay differences between waitstaff and kitchen staff.  

In response to Meyer's post, Adam Kerr, director of food and beverage at Bardessono Hotel and Spa in the Bay Area, said tip pooling didn't work. 

"Pooled tips never bring the results wanted," Kerr wrote. "Pay the kitchen what they deserve, build it into the budget accordingly."

The Department of Labor recently delayed the implementation of new rules governing the inclusion of some workers who perform tipped and untipped labor in tip pools.