A tip is not turnover: how a venue chooses to ask for one
Tips at a QR checkout: fixed amounts, percentages, or amounts on small bills and percentages on big ones. What a venue may set, what it may not — nothing pre-selected, the food as the base — and where a tip goes in the numbers afterwards.
A guest at a food hall is standing up, holding a phone, in a queue. That one fact decides most of how a tip should be asked for. They can tap "£2". They cannot work out twelve and a half per cent of £17.40, and a checkout that makes somebody do arithmetic to be generous gets less generosity, not more.
So the default offer is four fixed amounts and a pencil for typing another. But a venue that does table service has a different guest — sitting down, bill of £60 — where "£2" reads as an insult and a percentage is the natural gesture. And a venue with both kinds of trade wants both: amounts on a small bill, percentages once the bill is over a threshold. Those are the three ways a venue can now choose to offer a tip: fixed amounts, percentages, or the switch between them at a figure the venue sets. The chips a guest sees are drawn from that setting, and the settings screen shows exactly what a £8.50 counter order and a £64 table would each be offered before anything is saved.
What a venue may not change
Some of this is not a setting, and deliberately. Nothing is ever pre-selected: a tip that arrives already ticked is one somebody pays without meaning to, and the default is none, always. A percentage is worked out on the food, never on the food plus the service charge — a venue that charges service and then tips on top of it is charging twice for the same thing. An impossible tip is refused out loud rather than quietly taken; £500 typed against a £6 taco is a slipped finger, and taking it is how a chargeback starts. And the words about where the tip goes stay: it goes to the kitchen that cooked the food. Sharing it out between staff is not something this system does, and a dropdown offering to would be a lie.
Where it lands afterwards
A tip freely given is outside the scope of VAT and is not the kitchen's turnover. So it never enters the sales figure and never moves gross profit. It has its own line on the Sales report, beside the sales rather than inside them, and its own line in the accounting export. Until this week one of our screens said tips "appear in your sales reports" before any report showed them. That sentence is true now, which is the only acceptable order to do those two things in.