Hourly rate with tips and wages

Posted wage is the floor the restaurant pays for the hour. Take-home on a tipped shift is that wage plus the tips you kept. For each shift TrackMyTips computes:

Wages earned = (duration in minutes ÷ 60) × the hourly wage stored on that shift.

Net tips = total tips − (tip-out, or $0 if you never recorded one).

Total earnings = net tips + wages earned.

Per hour is total earnings ÷ hours. Any shift with a duration gets a rate, including a short one. A 12-minute clock-in with a couple of tips can show a very high $/hour. That number is arithmetically right and usually a bad summary of the job. The rate that matters is the same formula over the shifts in a real range: This Week, Last Week, Last Month, or All Time.

You can run one shift through the hourly rate calculator. It uses this formula and nothing else.

Seven hours as Expo, $12/hour, $83.20 in tips, no tip-out: wages are $84.00, total earnings are $167.20, and the rate is about $23.89/hour. Most of that night is the wage. The tips move it, and they do not replace it.

Six hours as Server, $8/hour, $210 in tips, $40 Total Tip-Out: wages are $48.00, net tips are $170.00, total earnings are $218.00, about $36.33/hour. Skip the tip-out and the same night keeps all $210 of tips, so total earnings are $258.00, exactly $43.00/hour. The second figure is what you collected. The first is what you kept.

Five hours as Hostess, $15/hour, $22 in tips, no tip-out: wages are $75.00, total earnings are $97.00, about $19.40/hour. Forty-five minutes as Bartender, $10/hour, $40 in tips, $0 tip-out: wages are $7.50, total earnings are $47.50, about $63.33/hour. Put that bartender fragment next to a full closing shift before you decide the short window is the job.

Roles & Hourly Wages holds a default wage for Hostess, Expo, Server, and Bartender, and a separate default for each custom role (up to four). A workplace can set its own wage for a role. When you clock in or add a shift, that wage is saved on the shift. Changing your defaults or a workplace wage later does not rewrite old shifts. If you edit the shift, you can change the wage stored on that shift.

If you clock in with $0 set for that role, wages earned for that shift stay $0 until you edit the wage on that shift. The next shift you clock uses the default or workplace wage that is set then. Two roles on one day stay two records, which is why a server lunch and a bar close should not share a clock-in.

Reports does not have a Today range. You pick This Week, Last Week, Last Month, or All Time. Filter to one workplace and those figures use that workplace’s shifts. The headline for that range is total earned, net tips, wages, per hour, shift count, and hours. Per hour on the report is the range’s total earnings divided by the minutes actually worked in that range. Expandable sections add money detail (including tip-outs, best and worst shift, and per-tip stats when tip rows have loaded), performance (hours, shift length, and best and worst hourly rate on shifts that have a duration), and a breakdown by role.

A role breakdown is how you tell a strong bar close from a slow host stand without averaging them into one meaningless rate. If Server weeks sit near the server example above and Hostess weeks sit near the wage, that is the comparison the report is for.

Suppose the week is the server night above (6 hours, $218 total), the host stand (5 hours, $97 total), and the expo night (7 hours, $167.20 total). Together that is 18 hours and $482.20. The week’s rate is about $26.79/hour. None of the three shifts matches that figure, and that is the point of the role breakdown: the week rate is a weighted average, so a long expo shift pulls a short, high server rate down.

Leave the server tip-out blank and the same calendar still shows $40 more in the server row and about $29.01/hour for the week ($522.20 ÷ 18). The formula did not change. The input did. When a week looks unusually rich, open the shifts and see which Total Tip-Out fields are still empty.

A 45-minute bartender fragment at about $63.33/hour barely moves that week if you add it: 18.75 hours and $529.70, about $28.25/hour once the server tip-out is recorded. Leave that tip-out blank and the same fragment sits inside $569.70, about $30.38/hour. Short shifts can look spectacular alone. Inside a real range they are a small numerator and a small denominator.

$/hour here is personal take-home math for the shifts you entered. It is not a comparison to minimum wage, not a payroll number your employer calculated, and not a tax figure. It ignores anything you did not log. Cash, Card, and Split are optional labels on a tip. They do not change the dollars in this rate. It does not know a tip-out percentage, only the dollar total you typed. If the wage on the shift is $0, the rate is tips divided by hours until you edit that shift’s wage or a later shift stores a real one.

Best and worst hourly rate in Reports use the same per-shift division on any shift that has a duration. A two-minute test clock-in with a tip on it can become the “best” rate in the range. Delete the accidental shift, or clock real hours, before you treat that row as a pattern.

A weekly or monthly goal can follow total earnings, which is net tips plus wages, or net tips only, which leaves the wage out. Progress sums that choice across shifts whose clock-in falls in the goal’s dates. A goal does not invent unlogged nights or fill in a tip-out you skipped. If the card looks ahead of the money you actually kept, check Total Tip-Out on those shifts first. See earnings goals and how to track tips.