The problem

Tips are considered extremely important across all businesses we spoke to, however the process of paying tips is quite demanding. Most venues pay their staff in cash. This means (especially for larger, multi venue restaurant groups) physically withdrawing very large sums of money from a bank, then dividing and distributing them to staff which is inherently risky.

Paying tips is also very time consuming. On average venue managers we spoke to said it takes them 4-5 hours to complete the task of ‘enveloping’ which involves manually calculating/dividing tips in a spreadsheet followed by physically diving and placing cash into envelopes for each staff member. For employees this means sometimes tips are distributed weeks/months after they are due because managers are extremely time poor. Some employees also reported having to collect their tips in person, even if they are not scheduled for work that day.

Solution / Value Proposition

Following initial research and problem solving. It was clear that the OnTheMonee product would have two main market segments, hospitality employees & employers each having many shared pain points but requiring their own solution.

Market Segments

Product Solution

OnTheMonee Web Portal: A fully automated tip distribution software and instant digital payment card for tips to make it easier, faster, and safer for restaurant employers to tip out their employees.

Digital Mastercard/Employee App: Employees receive hard earned tips direct to a digital wallet for immediate spend. Perks and rewards are built in too. The mobile app offers easy access to view tips which can be spent anywhere Mastercard is accepted – Exactly like cash, not linked to a bank account but tangible and instant.

Product Timeline

Product concept and development began in March with the aim of bringing on venues for a closed beta in September. After the Beta ran and feedback was gathered further development needs were scoped and roadmaps landing the official product launch in February 2024.

Closed Beta:

OnTheMonee ran a closed beta with 10 restaurant groups. This gave us a live testing period to validate:

Does it work?
Does it make Venue’s lives easier?
Are they happy to pay for it?
Are we ready to scale and support the product – processes, people security?
How do we approach launch based on what we know?

Beta activities included:

In person onboarding & venue setup
Support on first tip run
Bugs identified and resolved
Conduct survey/interviews to understand success metrics and feedback

Product overview (Beta)

Venues manage all tip payments through an online portal, providing speed, transparency, and improved cash management, with employees receiving tip payments directly to a digital wallet (see OnTheMonee App)

Tip Calculations

The pièce de résistance of OnTheMonee are the underlying tip calculations. For the beta launch we initially planned to implement 3 calculations that users could set and customise for their tip sheets as well as the ability to fill out the tip-sheet manually. Due to time constraints and development time we had to release our Beta MVP product, we made the decision to implement the % based split during pilot to be released at launch as only 1 of the 10 groups required it. The calculations were as followed:

Average hours (implemented)
By Shift (implemented)
manual (implemented)
% based split (descoped for beta, scoped for launch)

Weighting points

A key feature of all calculations are weighting points. Points can be assigned to individuals or work areas (i.e. Waiters, Chef, Bartenders etc. ) More points determines a higher weighting and a greater share of tips a person will receive.  It is important to note that points do not dictate a percentage. The way tips are calculated is tips are totalled, as are the number of points that the staff worked. The total tips are then divided by the total number of points to determine what each point is worth. This amount is then multiplied by each employees points to determine the amount each person receives.  

Average hours

Tip pooling by hours worked and weighting points. This is recommended for venues that want to distribute their total tips for day across all employees by the number of hours they have worked.

Hours worked x Work area weighting = Employee total points
Sum of all employees' total points = Total pool points
Total tips ($) / Total pool points = Point unit price ($)
Point unit price ($) x Employee total points = Employee’s daily tip allocation ($)

By Shift

Tip pooling by shift and weighting points. This is recommended for venues with tips that vary over different shifts and want their tips to be allocated to staff working them. I.e., a dinner shift typically receives more tips than breakfast.

Hours worked within the shift x weighting points = Employee shift points
Sum of all employees shifts points = Total pool points
Total tips ($) / Total pool points = Point unit price ($)
Point unit price ($) x Employee points = Employee’s shift tip allocation ($)
Sum of all employee’s shift tips = Employee’s daily tip allocation ($

Onboarding

There are two stages to onboarding. Organisational onboarding and Venue onboarding.

Organisational onboarding is usually completed by the Business owner who is the 'Super Admin’ and has access to all venues. This includes adding venue locations (orgs. can have one or many venues, each location will have its own float account setup under the hood automatically) and adding Admins for each location. Admins are generally the venue managers who currently distribute tips to staff.

Venue Onboarding encompasses all the settings needed to distribute tips. This includes:

Setting tip sheet pay cycle (weekly, fortnightly or monthly)
Choosing tip calculations
- how tips are pooled
- weighting points
- Work areas
Adding & Inviting (SMS) employees to OnTheMonee

Tip Sheet

This is where tips are entered for the pay cycle for the day and the hours or shifts works are entered for employees. Tip amounts for employees are automatically calculated based on the venues tip settings.

Tip Run (Disbursements)

When the user has completed the tip sheet they can then proceed to disburse tips to employess via the OnTheMonee Card. They simply complete the payout process and a real time payment is completed. For added security the user will need to enter an SMS code sent to the admin’s mobile number.

People Management

This is where users manage their employees. They can add new employees, edit employee details and see the status of the employees OnTheMonee Mastercard

Finance, Reporting & Settings

This is where users can view float balances and transfer funds, see past tip runs and download reports. Lastly users can view and edit the settings for their venues.

Beta & Feedback

Throughout the beta period users pain points were gathered. At the end of the 2 month time-frame a series of interviews were conducted with users to gather thoughts and feedback on the product. The main points of feedback were as follows:

The product saved time, however the overwhelming feedback was that Work Force Management (WFM) integrations would be essential as users still found the onboarding and tip allocation process cumbersome and these were small to medium size venues.
The percentage tip allocation was an essential calculation to include (which we had already assumed)
Every single venue wanted the ability to move funds to a ‘Slush’, which is a part of their current process
General Ux/UI feedback including language used, usability etc.
Employee experience was positive

The feedback was then collated, prioritised and scoped for development. The features and enhancements deemed necessary for launch would be aimed to be completed early 2024.

Enhancements & New Features - Official product launch

Based on feedback and learnings from our pilot we implemented a few features and enhancements before official launching OnTheMonee.

Work Force Management integrations (WFM) - Tanda & Deputy

This was essential for launching OnTheMonee, especially for attracting larger restaurant groups. We started with Tanda and Deputy as the majority of our clients and clients in the sales pipeline used them in their businesses. By integrating to WFM software we are able to sync data for venue information, employee information, as well as shift/timesheets to pre-fill the tip sheet. For large venues this is an essential feature as we know most venue managers are time poor and they do not want to be filling out 150+ employees shifts into a tip sheet manually.

Problem we are solving

Onboarding manually is an intensive process, especially for venues with a large amount of employees
Entering tip data is also time intensive

Why it’s important

Pilot venues asked for it
Large venues will not onboard without it

Slush funds

Slush funds are a regular concept across the hospitality industry. A “slush” is generally a portion of the tip pool that is reserved and kept within the business for staff and operational expenses such as staff birthdays, gifts, parties or incedentals.

We added on the ability create a slush fund, name a slush fund and allocate funds to/from this float account. Users can also deduct a percentage of or a dollar amount from the tip pool during the tips disbursement process which will be transferred into the slush float on completion of the tip run.

Why is this important

Every client asked for it
We now have potential clients not wanting to onboard without it

Commercial Benefits

Higher tip pool values extra revenue – slush funds can’t be withdrawn without the 2% fee
Adds additional float funds – interest revenue

Benefits

Promote the feature B2B marketing – no one else has it and everyone asks for it. Great value add.

Percent based tip pooling calculation

As mentioned previously, this was a tip calculation that was bumped from the beta release due to development timelines. During the pilot we continued development and released this additional tip setting. This setting allows venues to set up multiple pools and allocate a percentage of tips to each. Within each pool a venue can assign weighting points if needed. For example: Front of House employees gets 70% of all tips and Back of House employees are allocated 30% of tips. Employees within each pool can be weighted by work areas or individually.

Calculation:

Total tips x Work area % = Work area pool amount ($)

For each work area pool the tips are then calculated by average hours or by shift using the pool amount:
Hours worked x weighting = Employee points
Sum of all employees points = Total pool points
Work area pool tips ($) / Total pool points = Point unit price ($)
Point unit price ($) x Employee points = Employee’s shift tip allocation ($)
Sum of all employee’s shift tips = Employee’s daily tip allocation ($)

Successes

The OnTheMonee product successfully launched on-time & continues to grow. Our key metrics for success were:

Restaurant venues partnered
Transactions running through the system
Total amount of funds disbursed to cards
Number of cardholders (Employees)

OnTheMonee started with 10 venues, with the first week of tips paying out $1,200 to 12 people. As of March 2025 OnTheMonee has continued to grow and is currently clearing over $300,000 in tips for 56 restaurant venues and 4,500 employees every week.