Gratuity Assignment (Server vs Cashier)

Overview

You can choose which employee is credited with a gratuity (an auto-gratuity or a gratuity added by hand) and with discretionary credit-card tips on your bank, till and payroll reports.

There are two choices:

Cashier — the gratuity is credited to whoever closed the ticket.
Server — the gratuity is always credited to the server who owns the order, even if a different employee (cashier, manager, host) closes the ticket.

This setting matters because bank/till reports, the Server Report, and the Operations Report all group cash and tips by employee. If gratuity lands on someone other than the server who earned it, your servers' tip-out and reconciliation numbers will be off.

The setting in question is in Back Office → Settings → Tills → Gratuity Assignment.

How to Use

Open the back office.
Go to Settings → Tills.
Find Gratuity Assignment and pick:
- Cashier if you want the gratuity to follow whoever closed the ticket.
- Server if you want every gratuity to follow the server on the order, no matter who closes it. This is the most common setting for full-service restaurants.
Save.

The setting takes effect on the next gratuity recorded after the change. Existing till and bank entries are not retroactively reattributed — call OrderCounter support if you need historical days adjusted.

How it works in practice (Server mode)

The system identifies the server from the table assignment when the order is opened. If the table is reassigned mid-order, the new server takes ownership.
When the cashier closes out the ticket and a gratuity is on it, the gratuity goes to the server's bank or till — never the cashier's — regardless of whether the cashier has permission to transfer tables.
If the server doesn't have an open till, the gratuity goes into the server's personal bank (untilled funds). If the server is sharing a till with the cashier (e.g. group till mode), the gratuity stays in that till but is recorded under the server's name.

Who can add or remove a gratuity

Adding and removing a gratuity are controlled separately, because they carry different risk. Putting a gratuity on a check is routine, especially in a tip-pooling house where every check gets one. Taking one off changes what the house reports as gratuity, so it is held to a higher bar.

Both are gated by the same switch: Add Gratuity on Settings -> Staff & Tips -> Accessibility / Overrides. Leave it off and neither direction prompts. Turn it on and the POS asks for an approving employee, who must hold:

Action	Privilege required
Add a gratuity (Grat or Grat All on the order screen)	Gratuity
Remove a gratuity (Grat or Grat All on the order screen)	Alter Gratuity
Change a gratuity amount at checkout	Alter Gratuity

Grant these per job under Employees -> Jobs -> Privileges, or per employee to override the job.

Alter Gratuity is granted per job, so review your jobs list to see which jobs hold it. If you want removal restricted more tightly than adding, take Alter Gratuity away from the jobs that should not have it -- including every job, if your policy is that nobody removes a gratuity without a back-office adjustment.

Note that Alter Gratuity also governs Change Gratuity at checkout. A job that holds it can change gratuity amounts at checkout as well, not only remove them on the order screen. Review the jobs list if that is wider than you want.

Removing a gratuity on a check that qualifies for auto-gratuity

Once an approved employee takes a gratuity off a check, it stays off for the rest of that check -- even when the guest count is still at or above your Auto Gratuity threshold. The POS treats the removal as a deliberate decision and does not re-apply the rule to that ticket again.

This applies to all three places a gratuity comes off: the per-ticket Grat button, Grat All, and Change Gratuity at checkout. It applies whether the gratuity arrived automatically from an Auto Gratuity rule or was added by hand.

If you want the gratuity back on that check, press Grat again to add it.

Limitations

Only Server and Cashier modes are available. There is no per-shift or per-section override.
In Server mode, when the order has a server, the added gratuity always follows that server, on every order method.
The discretionary tip a customer writes on their receipt behaves differently by order method, because your Tip To First Employee settings also have a say:
- Takeout, Bar, Delivery, Drive Thru and Retail each have their own Tip To First Employee switch. For those methods, the switch decides. Leave it Off and the written tip stays with the employee who ran the card; turn it On and the tip goes to whoever started the order.
- Dine-in, For-Here and To-Go have no per-method switch, so in Server mode the written tip follows the server on the order.
- The Tip To First Employee All Order Methods switch, when On, turns the per-method switches on for every method.
Historical days are not retroactively rewritten when you change the setting. If you turn on Server mode mid-week, only days closed after the change reflect it.
The order must have an identifiable server. For a bar tab, the tab opener is treated as the server; for takeout/delivery the original order taker is. Walk-in cash sales with no employee opener fall back to the cashier — there's no one else to credit.
Changing the setting does not require a POS restart, but a terminal in the middle of an open ticket may pick up the new value only on the next ticket.

FAQ

The setting is on Server, but the gratuity still showed up under the cashier on yesterday's bank report. What happened?

Check when the setting was changed to Server. The setting applies only to gratuities recorded after the change, and reports for days that were closed earlier are not recalculated. Also check that the order had a server: a sale with no server falls back to the cashier (see Limitations above). Contact OrderCounter support if you need a historical adjustment.

Does this setting affect credit-card tip adjusts?

Yes, and the order method decides how. Discretionary credit-card tips — the amount a customer writes on the receipt at swipe time, plus tip adjusts entered later, after batch or at end of shift — follow the server on the order for dine-in, For-Here and To-Go when this setting is on Server.

For Takeout, Bar, Delivery, Drive Thru and Retail, the matching Tip To First Employee switch decides instead. That switch is how you tell us what your house rule is for those methods. A common setup is Server mode with Tip To First Employee Takeout Off: the gratuity follows the server, while a written tip on a takeout order stays with the employee who ran the card. See Limitations above for the full breakdown.

A server's tip total includes takeout tips that they never handled the card for. Why?

Check Tip To First Employee Takeout under General Till Settings. When it is On, a written tip on a takeout order goes to whoever started the order, not to whoever ran the card — so a server who rings up takeout orders will see those tips in their total even when someone else took the payment. Set it to Off if you want those tips to stay with the employee who ran the card. Days already closed keep the attribution they were saved with; contact OrderCounter support if you need a historical adjustment.

My cashier doesn't have permission to reassign tickets — does that matter?

No, not for gratuity routing. Even cashiers without permission to transfer tables still have their gratuities routed to the right server when this setting is on Server. The permission only governs whether they can manually reassign the whole order during checkout.

What if the server has already cashed out and gone home, and I close their last ticket?

The gratuity still gets credited to the server. If the server has no open till, it goes to their untilled funds (their personal bank), which they would close out separately or which gets carried into the next shift, depending on your store's reconciliation flow.

Where does a cash gratuity show up when gratuities are paid on paychecks?

When Gratuities on Paychecks and Include Cash Gratuity on Paychecks are both on, a cash gratuity stays in the cash drawer and counts toward the expected cash deposit. The server is paid that gratuity on their paycheck instead of in cash at the end of the shift, and it is included in the server's gratuity on the Employee Payroll Income Report. These settings are independent of Gratuity Assignment, and they work together: Gratuity Assignment decides which employee is credited, and the paycheck settings decide how that employee is paid. Contact OrderCounter support to change the paycheck settings.