Getting started

Have these to hand: a list of the people who work at your venue, the job each person does, and how tips come in (card, cash, service charge).

Fairpool helps you follow the Employment (Allocation of Tips) Act 2023, which we call the Tips Act. In short, it says: give workers all the tips, share them fairly, pay them on time, have a written tipping policy and keep records.

Good to know: Already pay tips through an independent tronc? In Fairpool your business decides the shares. HMRC treats that as the employer being involved, so National Insurance becomes due on tips that were free of it. Talk to your payroll adviser before you switch.

1. Go to the sign-in page and fill in Create an organisation: your name, your business name, your first venue, your email and a password. Your 30-day free trial starts straight away. You don't need a card.
2. Check your venue. A venue is one place of business, such as one pub. If you run more than one site, add each one from the Venues page. Tips from one site can never be shared with another.
3. Add your team on the venue page: each person's name, their role (their job) and a role weight. A role weight says how much an hour in that job counts. If you're not sure, start everyone on 1.
4. Under Written policy, press Edit & publish. Fairpool starts you with a template, which workers can already see through the policy link. Replace every line that starts “[Manager:” with your own details, make the weights match your team, then press Publish new version.
5. Record your tips under Tip intake: the date customers paid, the full amount and where it came from.
6. Log hours under Hours: who worked, which day and for how long.
7. At the end of the month, run an allocation. That's when Fairpool shares out the tips for a period between the people who worked. Then pay everyone by the pay-by date shown, which is the last day you can legally pay.
8. Give each worker a private link so they can see their own tips and your policy. You do this from their page.

Your Dashboard has an Act checklist for each venue. When every item says Done, that venue is set up. Anything marked Missing tells you what to do next. The yearly review is a recommendation, so it says Not yet rather than Missing.

Good to know: Check hours and weights carefully before your first allocation. Fairpool doesn't let you change or delete an allocation once it's published, so it stays a fixed record of what each person was owed.

• Adding workers and role weights
• Recording tips
• Running an allocation and paying staff on time
• Not sure what a word means? See words we use.