Run your tips the legitimate way

It moves your tips onto a legitimate, documented system that never touches your bank account, which retires a real CRA liability, gives your staff a savings and credit-building benefit they value, and takes cash-handling off your plate.

A CRA liability designed out. A staff benefit that lowers turnover and training cost. No cash to store, count, or send anyone home carrying. Almost no work for you: your staff run the allocation and setup is a one-time account authorization. And a clean, documented record of every tip.

You pay the higher of a $250 per location per month base rate or 35% of the card-processing fees we save you. Because tips run through the Industry Savings app instead of your card terminal, you stop paying card fees on them, and we charge a share of that saving with the base rate as a floor. At larger sales the percentage is what applies; larger groups and chains are priced by negotiation. Retiring your CPP/EI audit exposure is included at no extra cost. Industry Savings never charges your staff to receive a tip, and they cash out free; the only deduction is the card companies' processing fee (about 3%) from the pool before tips are split, and the guest is never surcharged.

Very little. Setup is a one-time account authorization. After that, a designated staff member (the Captain) allocates each period's tips in a few minutes, and you stay hands-off from the money entirely.

If your house pools tips and they run through your accounts, the CRA can treat them as controlled tips and hold you liable for CPP and EI on every tip dollar, plus penalties and several years of back-assessment. On a $1M location that is roughly $12,000 to $24,000 a year, and a real audit reaching back can land at $50,000 to $100,000 or more. Across a chain it runs into the millions, unfunded, sitting on your books right now.

Direct tips are paid by the customer to the employee, with the employer a mere conduit that does not control the amount or how it is split. There is no employer payroll obligation, and the employee reports the income themselves. Controlled tips are ones the employer controls or redistributes, by setting the pool formula, holding the money, or running it through company accounts. Controlled tips carry the CPP and EI obligation. The Federal Court of Appeal confirmed in Ristorante a Mano that electronic tips passing through the employer's bank account made the employer the payer.

Three ways. Guests pay or tip directly into the pooled Industry Savings account, so the tips never rest in your account and you are never the payer. Your staff, not management, run the allocation, and they choose the tip-out method from set options, with a record of who chose it. And every tip is documented so the worker self-reports. That combination is designed to keep the tips treated as direct.

Yes. Industry Savings is built around the exact facts that keep tips direct: guests pay or tip directly into the pool so the tips never touch your account, staff control a staff-chosen allocation, and every tip is documented. It is designed to be the legitimate, audit-proof way to run tips.

In one pooled account held by a licensed bank, under a standard for-benefit-of arrangement. Industry Savings is only the ledger that tracks who owns what; we never hold the funds in our own account and have no company float to misuse. Every dollar reconciles to the cent, continuously.

No. We never debit your account at any point. Guests pay or tip directly into the pooled account, so your money never flows through us.

That is exactly the risk we designed out. The platform that recently cost this industry more than $10 million held client money in its own accounts and used it to run the business, and the Bank of Canada barred it for failing to safeguard client funds. We cannot do that, because a licensed bank holds the money and we only keep the ledger. Trusted, regulated partners: a bank to hold, a major processor to move, Interac to pay out.

We are building to the Canadian rules for a money-services business: FINTRAC registration, a named compliance officer, identity verification, record-keeping, and the safeguarding requirements that apply when client funds are held. The full compliance program is being finalized before any real money moves.

Tips have always been taxable, with or without us. What we do is make the record clean and give staff a tax set-aside so declaring does not hurt them. You are not the tax police, and staff have their own plain-language answers to the tax questions in their app.

Your staff do. A designated staff member runs the allocation, and the team chooses the tip-out method from set options. Keeping it staff-controlled is deliberate: an employer-set formula points toward controlled tips, while a staff-chosen one supports the direct-tip position, and it usually lands on the same fair tip-outs anyway.

Their account is theirs and goes with them. Their balances and income history follow them to the next job, which just re-verifies them and adds them back. Nothing for you to unwind.