I am trying to generate reports/feeds that match the team member tip allocation show in the Team app. We use the shift tip pooling feature to automatically split tips.
From the dashboard, Transaction Payment details show how each tip is allocated among eligible team members, like this.
As can be seen, for amounts that do not split equally among team members, an extra penny is allocated to one of the team members somehow.
Is there an API that exposes the tip allocation that is shown in the payment details and collected for reporting in the Team app?
If not, can the allocation algorithm be described so that matching tip amounts can be generated programmatically?
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The Team API does not currently expose the tip allocation that is shown in the payment details. The allocation algorithm is not publicly available, so it cannot be replicated programmatically. However, you can use the Team API to manage team members and their roles, and the Payments API to retrieve payment details, including tip amounts. But the specific allocation of tips among team members in a shift is not available through the APIs.
@Bryan-Square, I appreciate your help and it is not my intent to shoot the messenger. I understand that this situation is not by your design or any of your actions.
This is incredibly frustrating and bordering on unacceptable. The whole reason I started down this path is because Square removed shift level tip reporting from the CSV files available via the dashboard.
Square Payroll will not work for my company because we have multiple locations in different tax districts with employees who work across them. To be compliant, we must be able to report hours and tips per shift based on the location where worked, and Square Payroll cannot do this.
We had been using the CSV export to provide this information to our payroll processor without requiring a lot of manual intervention and the associated keystroke errors. We now have to manually pull the details from the dashboard (and still do a little bit of guessing).
We are now left in a situation where we can approximate staff tips, but not exactly match what team members are shown in the Team app. Having to explain to your employees that your systems are fuzzy with pay, even by a few cents, is not great.
This also means that our payroll and accounting systems drift a bit from what Square reports, which is also problematic when doing research and auditing.
I understand the need to have proprietary systems and algorithms, but calculating staff tips and being able to prove them as correct with pencil and paper should not be some big trade secret.
I doubt that there is anything you can do about this, but I went on this rant in hopes that someone higher up the food chain might see this and actually care about Square customers.
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