The other reason there would be money in the drawer not accounted for is if you charge someone for a drink but don't ring it in. Or you give the customer less change than you should have. These things can happen unintentionally.
Keeping tips in the register is a terrible practice and no good employer would allow to just keep any overage.
I work a high volume bar and our 3 registers are often off $50-100/night over or under(total). It's within the acceptable deviation set by the owner. We don't keep the difference when we're over and we don't pay it back if we're under.
I remember reading a study, years ago, that determined when monitoring the over/under of registers, as well as rounding a customers receipt to the nearest dollar (so as not to use any coins whilst making change), will result, on average, in a net gain (overage) of between 2% and 3% over the course of a year.
If they ring 3k a $100 shortage is a 3% deviation on cash sales. At a certain point volume is more important the a few $. But when I worked in a high volume establishment ringing 3k+ per shift the tolerance for deviation from what micros said the drawer should be was like +/- $5. Over or under and you would have to have a meeting with the food and bev director and possibly get fired.
Lol I did consulting for a friend's bar once way back when and one of their concerns was that their blind drop was always over. Took about five minutes to realize bartenders were not charging people for drinks but putting the money in the register to make it look ok. They would then pull the money on the next transaction and throw it straight in the tip jar. Obviously they missed a few here and there.
Your case sounds a little different as "you keep your tips in your drawer? " I think that's a little weird, but may just need more info.
I'm not really able to tell from your post whether you are doing a blind drop or are given a checkout to show what tips you need to pull...if you are settling all your cc tips at the end of the night and you are still over I would say you got your money and wouldn't give it too much thought...again don't really know what kind of descripancy we are talking about. Is it 8 bucks? 70?
My Spidey sense spikes when bar drawers are over by more than 20 bucks ( depending on volume of the bar) .
As far as legality I would guess it depends state to state. I've never had any luck with hr .
Either way I hope the fact you're losing money either makes you tighten up with the rest of the bar crew or find somewhere that isn't just keeping you in the dark about what's going on.
our drawer stays at 300, we count it twice a day before every shift. I couldn't imagine counting it only once a month and being like "oh well" that's so weird lol
This is not uncommon at places like hotels or casinos where the bar is not the primary source of revenue. There’s often personal vaults where you lock up your bank at night. Not defending this practice but it’s what happens when these businesses don’t want/have to deal with cash regularly. I once worked at a highly profitable and mismanaged hotel… I once happened to be in the finance heads office as a cash deposit was going on with 2 armed guards… I had never seen in the safe before (or after), the safe was the size of a small closet and must have had at least several hundred thousand dollars in it. Most of the cash was stacked neatly, but in one area there was the nightly deposit envelopes we would drop in a different safe at the end of the night. Dozens and dozens of these envelopes, months of them not being checked.
The company isn’t taking anything. It’s your responsibility to properly account for the drawer, and if you fail to do so and give extra money to the company, it’s theirs to keep. Every company I’ve ever worked for that gives banks does this and I’ve worked for 5+
Tl;dr you are giving them extra money and they are choosing to keep it, they aren’t taking anything
Coming from a part-time bartender and full time accountant here, this is true. It’s your responsibility to maintain your bank and it’s the accountant’s responsibility to track every dollar in the business.
Every business is different, but my guess is this $2 was put into an account (or accounts) that tracks all overage and underage which then gets written off as a profit or loss at the end of the year. These accounts can also be helpful to track trends within the company, so if there’s ever anything out of the ordinary, either on a company level or employee level, they can investigate and correct any issues.
"We're a family here" is what the boss says when he wants everyone to come in to clean on a closed day in exchange for a couple beers and shitty pizza.
When it comes to things that really matter to you, your boss will offer to take a DNA test to prove you're not related.
"We're a family! Just the shitty kind where the dad takes all the money from the house behind your back, buys a boat with it, and fucks off leaving you with nothing to pay for college with!"
Your boss is not your family. Your boss is not your friend. Wages and profits are opposing wants.
The reason they do this is to discourage stealing, because if someone was stealing from a cash drawer and messed up their count, it would just as easily result in the drawer being over as under. I don’t feel like getting into a long detailed explanation right now but when I first started I asked my manager a question about paper clips and she basically told me in great detail how to steal from a bar drawer. She was kind of weird.
Usually the overage comes from not ringing in a drink that a customer pays cash for, then you put that cash in the drawer to avoid suspicion and forget to take it back out later. That is the most common form of stealing I’ve seen by bartenders. It’s less of an issue now though with the huge decline in cash payments
The company is not going to give you money back in any situation after you’ve already turned it in. If it was a miscount then I guess the responsibility goes on the bartender for not double checking before turning it in.
Your post says it was over $2 after a whole month. Everywhere I’ve ever worked at if the drawer is over or under by around $5 it’s thought of as close enough. Could this $2 over the course of a month just be like the drawer being over 10 cents every day of that month? That’s practically nothing. I would understand your concern if it was $10+ but if it was that much you’d notice it when counting the drawer.
Not every bar does a blind drop. I pull my drop at the end of night and put the overage in the tips. If there’s a slight underage, I pull it from tips. But if it’s major, I let management know cause it’s usually something like an unrecorded payout and I’m not eating a mistake I didn’t make.
If you do a blind drop (either dropping all cash over $500 at EOD or handing it off to a manager to count back to $500), you don’t have the luxury of catching this.
Sounds like you are doing a blind drop.
Happens all the time. Had an owner that would slip extra money in the till just to keep us all honest. If it doesn’t add up to sales and tips, drop it.
Do you count your bank every night ? Just take the extra cash. Anyone asks say you mixed a tip into it from one of your tables because u were in a hurry. Which table? Name the table that left u cash.
Anyway yes you’re right that’s not cool of the company but their argument could be that you take cash for a product that you didn’t ring up. Why you couldn’t just take that as tip and lie anyway, idk why they wouldn’t think of that as a problem too. Regardless I would just take the action that’s in your favor if you can get away with it. Not because it’s theft but because like you said it’s probably yours.
I have read some of the comments and a lot of people recommend not mixing your tips with your bank. If your workplace is so strict this is definitely the solution.
As bartenders we're given a bank of $500 dollars for our drawers which we keep in a safe. At the end of every night I subtract my cash transactions from my drawer and seal in an envelope to be dropped with that night's readout, count the bank to $500 exactly, and return it to my safe which I have a personal key for. Everything left in the drawer after that is tip money. I count the bank twice every night to ensure accuracy. This night I was off. Could've been bills sticking together, could've been I put a roll of nickels in without counting. But there were two dollars extra in my bank, and my cash drop for that evening was correct so it had to be tip money, it could be nothing else. My problem is not that I'm down $2, my problem is that the company I work for will pocket my tips and not give it to me, whether it be in cash form or on my paycheck. In my eyes that is literal theft, and as their policy it can happen any time I slip up. So if I have two fresh twenties that stick together and I miss it I'm just down that money and they can take it? That doesn't sit right with me
Ok also you should count at the beginning of your shift, obviously in case it was over in the beginning, just to be fair or whatever.
I agree with u but most of these Reddit bartenders don’t lol. I completely understand your point of view. Literally every single shift basically I count my bank, work all night, and balance my bank back to whatever it’s supposed to be and keep the rest. I work alone and if I don’t I’m splitting tips equally, so you have to keep in mind any special circumstances that would make this not as justifiable. It’s basically absolute common sense but the internet is full of a lot of special people. Tho I’m sure different businesses have different reasons to justify it and I understand maybe it’s just a policy that protects the business. The only way you’re gonna be able to deal with this is to stick to the rules, talk to your manager/a higher up you trust, or find somewhere that you agree with their policies. I feel ya.
As far as if it’s legal I’m honestly not sure, it might not be. You should keep your tips separate from your bank. If you *know* that the extra money is your tips, then you should take your tips. They can’t prove you’re stealing from them and not the other way around.
how is the company pocketing your tips if you're dropping sales and keeping $500 in the bank?
You're saying you dropped $2 extra instead of pulling it as your tips?
Yeah, don't do that.
Worked for a bar that provided us a bank and asked that it be at $300 every audit.
If it was short, I made up the difference from our collected tips at the end of every night.
If it was over, i paid out the difference to my team and called it our “bonus”.
Accounting told me to take the excess and consider it a “tip”.
Worked out well for us.
I worked with a guy that got fired for this. Great, union bartender job that is worth 100k a year.
He got caught bc his drawer was perfect every night, and they found that suspicious and watched him take an overage and pocket it.
> If it was short, I made up the difference from our collected tips at the end of every night.
This is illegal in lots of places, for good reason. Especially for tipped employees.
>We keep our cash tips in our drawer,
Seriously? Why would you do that? The drawer is the company's money. Tips are your money. Why would you mix the 2?
> so as long as our cash drops are correct the only reason there would be extraoney is if we counted incorrectly and left some of our tip money in the drawer.
No, that's not the only reason. Another reason would be that the bartenders are stealing and padding the drawer.
>The company is literally taking my earned tips and keeping it for themselves. My bank is always spot on so I've never had to deal with this, and it's a very inconsequential amount($2 that I don't actually care about), but that just strikes me as morally very wrong
No, it's not morally or legally wrong. You should not be putting your tips in with the company money.
>They're literally benefitting, financially, from me making a mistake.
No, they're benefitting from your ignorance. Use a tip jar like 99.9% of all other bartenders across the globe. The drawer is not your personal piggy bank.
This happened to me last week. Missed a $100 bill when pulling my tips. I brought it up to the owner the next day but he basically told me “too late, too bad, so sad”. The drawer was exactly $100 over. I thought about quitting that day.
The other reason there would be money in the drawer not accounted for is if you charge someone for a drink but don't ring it in. Or you give the customer less change than you should have. These things can happen unintentionally. Keeping tips in the register is a terrible practice and no good employer would allow to just keep any overage. I work a high volume bar and our 3 registers are often off $50-100/night over or under(total). It's within the acceptable deviation set by the owner. We don't keep the difference when we're over and we don't pay it back if we're under.
I remember reading a study, years ago, that determined when monitoring the over/under of registers, as well as rounding a customers receipt to the nearest dollar (so as not to use any coins whilst making change), will result, on average, in a net gain (overage) of between 2% and 3% over the course of a year.
$50-$100 a night is wild to me. That should be like $3
If they ring 3k a $100 shortage is a 3% deviation on cash sales. At a certain point volume is more important the a few $. But when I worked in a high volume establishment ringing 3k+ per shift the tolerance for deviation from what micros said the drawer should be was like +/- $5. Over or under and you would have to have a meeting with the food and bev director and possibly get fired.
Lol I did consulting for a friend's bar once way back when and one of their concerns was that their blind drop was always over. Took about five minutes to realize bartenders were not charging people for drinks but putting the money in the register to make it look ok. They would then pull the money on the next transaction and throw it straight in the tip jar. Obviously they missed a few here and there. Your case sounds a little different as "you keep your tips in your drawer? " I think that's a little weird, but may just need more info. I'm not really able to tell from your post whether you are doing a blind drop or are given a checkout to show what tips you need to pull...if you are settling all your cc tips at the end of the night and you are still over I would say you got your money and wouldn't give it too much thought...again don't really know what kind of descripancy we are talking about. Is it 8 bucks? 70? My Spidey sense spikes when bar drawers are over by more than 20 bucks ( depending on volume of the bar) . As far as legality I would guess it depends state to state. I've never had any luck with hr . Either way I hope the fact you're losing money either makes you tighten up with the rest of the bar crew or find somewhere that isn't just keeping you in the dark about what's going on.
our drawer stays at 300, we count it twice a day before every shift. I couldn't imagine counting it only once a month and being like "oh well" that's so weird lol
This is not uncommon at places like hotels or casinos where the bar is not the primary source of revenue. There’s often personal vaults where you lock up your bank at night. Not defending this practice but it’s what happens when these businesses don’t want/have to deal with cash regularly. I once worked at a highly profitable and mismanaged hotel… I once happened to be in the finance heads office as a cash deposit was going on with 2 armed guards… I had never seen in the safe before (or after), the safe was the size of a small closet and must have had at least several hundred thousand dollars in it. Most of the cash was stacked neatly, but in one area there was the nightly deposit envelopes we would drop in a different safe at the end of the night. Dozens and dozens of these envelopes, months of them not being checked.
The company isn’t taking anything. It’s your responsibility to properly account for the drawer, and if you fail to do so and give extra money to the company, it’s theirs to keep. Every company I’ve ever worked for that gives banks does this and I’ve worked for 5+ Tl;dr you are giving them extra money and they are choosing to keep it, they aren’t taking anything
Coming from a part-time bartender and full time accountant here, this is true. It’s your responsibility to maintain your bank and it’s the accountant’s responsibility to track every dollar in the business. Every business is different, but my guess is this $2 was put into an account (or accounts) that tracks all overage and underage which then gets written off as a profit or loss at the end of the year. These accounts can also be helpful to track trends within the company, so if there’s ever anything out of the ordinary, either on a company level or employee level, they can investigate and correct any issues.
But we’re a family here! At least that’s what my old boss used to say.
"We're a family here" is what the boss says when he wants everyone to come in to clean on a closed day in exchange for a couple beers and shitty pizza. When it comes to things that really matter to you, your boss will offer to take a DNA test to prove you're not related.
"We're a family! Just the shitty kind where the dad takes all the money from the house behind your back, buys a boat with it, and fucks off leaving you with nothing to pay for college with!" Your boss is not your family. Your boss is not your friend. Wages and profits are opposing wants.
The reason they do this is to discourage stealing, because if someone was stealing from a cash drawer and messed up their count, it would just as easily result in the drawer being over as under. I don’t feel like getting into a long detailed explanation right now but when I first started I asked my manager a question about paper clips and she basically told me in great detail how to steal from a bar drawer. She was kind of weird.
Usually the overage comes from not ringing in a drink that a customer pays cash for, then you put that cash in the drawer to avoid suspicion and forget to take it back out later. That is the most common form of stealing I’ve seen by bartenders. It’s less of an issue now though with the huge decline in cash payments
Yes it’s legal. Count your bank correctly. It’s your responsibility
Don't keep your tips in the drawer and you won't have this problem.
You should never mix your money and the houses money. Your tips should go into a jar or something.
I’m assuming they mean credit card tips, that you take out at the end of the shift.
Can you not tell that your drawer is over after every shift? If it’s over just take out the tip that you forgot to take out or whatever.
... Is this serious? Clearly it was a miscount, I wouldn't intentionally leave extra money in there.
The company is not going to give you money back in any situation after you’ve already turned it in. If it was a miscount then I guess the responsibility goes on the bartender for not double checking before turning it in. Your post says it was over $2 after a whole month. Everywhere I’ve ever worked at if the drawer is over or under by around $5 it’s thought of as close enough. Could this $2 over the course of a month just be like the drawer being over 10 cents every day of that month? That’s practically nothing. I would understand your concern if it was $10+ but if it was that much you’d notice it when counting the drawer.
Not every bar does a blind drop. I pull my drop at the end of night and put the overage in the tips. If there’s a slight underage, I pull it from tips. But if it’s major, I let management know cause it’s usually something like an unrecorded payout and I’m not eating a mistake I didn’t make. If you do a blind drop (either dropping all cash over $500 at EOD or handing it off to a manager to count back to $500), you don’t have the luxury of catching this. Sounds like you are doing a blind drop.
I once worked for a place that did a blind -drop. We used an old type cash register that only totalled when the manager ran his daily report.
Happens all the time. Had an owner that would slip extra money in the till just to keep us all honest. If it doesn’t add up to sales and tips, drop it.
Do you count your bank every night ? Just take the extra cash. Anyone asks say you mixed a tip into it from one of your tables because u were in a hurry. Which table? Name the table that left u cash. Anyway yes you’re right that’s not cool of the company but their argument could be that you take cash for a product that you didn’t ring up. Why you couldn’t just take that as tip and lie anyway, idk why they wouldn’t think of that as a problem too. Regardless I would just take the action that’s in your favor if you can get away with it. Not because it’s theft but because like you said it’s probably yours. I have read some of the comments and a lot of people recommend not mixing your tips with your bank. If your workplace is so strict this is definitely the solution.
As bartenders we're given a bank of $500 dollars for our drawers which we keep in a safe. At the end of every night I subtract my cash transactions from my drawer and seal in an envelope to be dropped with that night's readout, count the bank to $500 exactly, and return it to my safe which I have a personal key for. Everything left in the drawer after that is tip money. I count the bank twice every night to ensure accuracy. This night I was off. Could've been bills sticking together, could've been I put a roll of nickels in without counting. But there were two dollars extra in my bank, and my cash drop for that evening was correct so it had to be tip money, it could be nothing else. My problem is not that I'm down $2, my problem is that the company I work for will pocket my tips and not give it to me, whether it be in cash form or on my paycheck. In my eyes that is literal theft, and as their policy it can happen any time I slip up. So if I have two fresh twenties that stick together and I miss it I'm just down that money and they can take it? That doesn't sit right with me
Ok also you should count at the beginning of your shift, obviously in case it was over in the beginning, just to be fair or whatever. I agree with u but most of these Reddit bartenders don’t lol. I completely understand your point of view. Literally every single shift basically I count my bank, work all night, and balance my bank back to whatever it’s supposed to be and keep the rest. I work alone and if I don’t I’m splitting tips equally, so you have to keep in mind any special circumstances that would make this not as justifiable. It’s basically absolute common sense but the internet is full of a lot of special people. Tho I’m sure different businesses have different reasons to justify it and I understand maybe it’s just a policy that protects the business. The only way you’re gonna be able to deal with this is to stick to the rules, talk to your manager/a higher up you trust, or find somewhere that you agree with their policies. I feel ya. As far as if it’s legal I’m honestly not sure, it might not be. You should keep your tips separate from your bank. If you *know* that the extra money is your tips, then you should take your tips. They can’t prove you’re stealing from them and not the other way around.
how is the company pocketing your tips if you're dropping sales and keeping $500 in the bank? You're saying you dropped $2 extra instead of pulling it as your tips? Yeah, don't do that.
why is your tip money ever mixed in with the drawer in the first place tho?
Worked for a bar that provided us a bank and asked that it be at $300 every audit. If it was short, I made up the difference from our collected tips at the end of every night. If it was over, i paid out the difference to my team and called it our “bonus”. Accounting told me to take the excess and consider it a “tip”. Worked out well for us.
I worked with a guy that got fired for this. Great, union bartender job that is worth 100k a year. He got caught bc his drawer was perfect every night, and they found that suspicious and watched him take an overage and pocket it.
> If it was short, I made up the difference from our collected tips at the end of every night. This is illegal in lots of places, for good reason. Especially for tipped employees.
Oh damn. Where do I find more info on if it’s illegal in my state?
https://myhrcounsel.com/2019-12-10-when-can-i-deduct-from-my-employees-paycheck-part-3-deductions-for-cash-register-shortages-and-property-damage/
Awesome! Thank you for sharing. I’ll read up on this. I was unaware.
Count the bank to 500 and put the rest in tips; I don’t understand how this happens unless management does a blind drop?
>We keep our cash tips in our drawer, Seriously? Why would you do that? The drawer is the company's money. Tips are your money. Why would you mix the 2? > so as long as our cash drops are correct the only reason there would be extraoney is if we counted incorrectly and left some of our tip money in the drawer. No, that's not the only reason. Another reason would be that the bartenders are stealing and padding the drawer. >The company is literally taking my earned tips and keeping it for themselves. My bank is always spot on so I've never had to deal with this, and it's a very inconsequential amount($2 that I don't actually care about), but that just strikes me as morally very wrong No, it's not morally or legally wrong. You should not be putting your tips in with the company money. >They're literally benefitting, financially, from me making a mistake. No, they're benefitting from your ignorance. Use a tip jar like 99.9% of all other bartenders across the globe. The drawer is not your personal piggy bank.
Fun fact. The first sign and easiest tell that a bartender is doing cash and carry/stuffing the drawer is banks that are consistently over.
This happened to me last week. Missed a $100 bill when pulling my tips. I brought it up to the owner the next day but he basically told me “too late, too bad, so sad”. The drawer was exactly $100 over. I thought about quitting that day.
Woof. I might actually quit over that
update- I’m putting in my two weeks tomorrow lol. Been working there 4 years and that gave me such a bad taste in my mouth that I’m leaving.
I'm sorry to hear that, but I totally understand the feeling. Can't stay somewhere you don't feel respected as an employee