TipHaus: Improving Tip Distribution for Restaurant Owners and Managers

In the United States, it is estimated that over $35 billion in tips are given out to tipped workers every year. However, calculating and distributing these tips often causes issues for both the restaurant managers and the employees receiving the tips. Managers have to calculate the tips daily and keep track of how much money each worker earned, creating a time-consuming administrative burden. For tipped workers, they often have to wait until their next paycheck arrives to access the tips they are owed, causing cash flow issues for millions of workers. 

‍TipHaus, the restaurant industry’s leading tip software company, set out to solve both of these problems. 

First, they built an automated tip calculation software platform. With TipHaus, managers are able to set up the specific tip calculation logic that works best for their restaurant. By integrating into the restaurant’s point of sale system, the daily tips are automatically calculated for each employee. Using TipHaus’ platform, restaurant managers can expect to save around 20 labor hours per month. 

Then came the challenge of improving the distribution of these tips into the employees’ bank accounts. In order to provide workers same-day access to their tip earnings, TipHaus realized it needed to build its own banking products to speed up and have more control over the movement of these funds. 

That’s where Synctera stepped in to help bring this product vision to life. 

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Building a differentiated product by adding banking and money movement

Building banking and seamless money movement products for restaurants and their tipped workers would help solve a key customer pain point, while also differentiating TipHaus’ product from the competition. To create a comprehensive solution, TipHaus worked with Synctera to build Earned Tip Access, a solution offering two separate methods for restaurants to instantly send the tips calculated by TipHaus’ platform to each specific employee.

Earned Tip Access is comprised of two banking and money movement solutions:

1. hausmoney, a neobank for tipped workers, allows account holders to access their earned tips in minutes. They can then can save those funds in their bank account or spend them using their hausmoney debit card.
2. hausdirect, a solution that allows the employee to bypass having an additional bank account. Through a preferred card on file, employees can choose to have tips sent back to their personal bank account through their debit card.

To create these products, Synctera matched TipHaus with a sponsor bank that made TipHaus feel confident they could launch the banking products they knew would revolutionize the way tipped workers are paid. 

Once partnered with their sponsor bank, TipHaus used Synctera’s robust set of APIs to build out their banking products, embedding them directly into their tip calculation software for a seamless user experience. 

“Even after a ton of meetings with banks on our own, no one felt like a true partner,” said Kirk Grogan, TipHaus COO. “The team at Synctera was like a Rosetta Stone for us, helping make sense of all the disparate banking and financial nomenclature to find a bank we felt like was there to help us succeed.”

Now, with the first and only end-to-end solution for tip distribution, TipHaus has an undeniable differentiation from the other “half-baked software solutions” on the market that can only address one half of Tiphaus’ full-suite solution. 

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Results

TipHaus’ banking products have seen rapid adoption since January 2023. Their customers have opened over 1,600 total accounts and generated over $3 million in card transaction volume. 

With the help of Synctera’s Banking as a Service platform and team of experts, TipHaus is helping to create a better financial experience for restaurant managers and tipped workers all around the country. 

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