Background

Hop City Craft Beer & Wine is a popular craft beer and wine retailer with locations in Fayetteville, GA and Atlanta, GA—as well as one location in Birmingham, AL. Their Fayetteville location also contains a restaurant and rooftop bar called Barleygarden. Hop City employees make a substantial amount in tips, but managers were running into problems when trying to tip out their employees in cash.

The growing need for cashless tips

CJ Dimino, Director of Restaurant Operations for Hop City Craft Beer & Wine, was facing a huge challenge: Tipping out all his employees in cash each day was becoming burdensome. During their busy season, Hop City can do anywhere between $60,000-$100,000 per week in business. Assuming their servers typically make 18%, 18% of $100,000 is $18,000; a substantial amount to try and tip out in cash for any organization.

There are some banking flags that go off when you have to pull $20,000 each week,” Dimino says. “It’s not easy to just go and take out 20 grand, actually. You cannot do it same-day, and the bank doesn’t have it ready for you. So it just made way more sense for us to go cashless.

Dimino knew they had to go cashless. On the hunt for a solution to streamline tip payouts, he first found Gratuity Solutions, a platform that could calculate tip payouts and automate tip pooling on the fly. Next, he had to find a platform which could disperse those funds to their employees. After receiving an email from Branch, Dimino knew it was the perfect missing piece that Hop City needed to complete their new streamlined tips process.

Saving time and motivating employees with digital tips

With Branch and Gratuity Solutions, Hop City can now send instant digital tip payouts to their employees at the end of each night. This has a huge impact on workplace satisfaction and engagement, motivating employees to come to work each day and go home with money in their bank accounts.

Dimino was quick to recognize that faster payments have become crucial to retaining restaurant talent in today’s economy.

You miss tips for even one day and all hell breaks loose. We’re in one of those multi-use developments—you’ve got restaurants, apartments, offices…any employee could go two doors down and get another job instantly if (they wanted). So this solution had to be perfect.

Luckily, it’s been a seamless process and they’ve had nothing but positive feedback from employees—not to mention, it’s saved Dimino and his team a huge amount of time and hassle each week.

It speeds things up a lot,” Dimino says. “On a Friday night, the manager is responsible for paying out the whole staff at the end of the night, which is maybe 30 people. In the past, that was stuffing 30 envelopes with tips–that is time-consuming, just the physical manual labor. I’d say it saves between 1-2 hours of management time each day. Now the process takes 10 minutes, tops.

Streamlined processes, greater satisfaction

Prior to switching to Branch & Gratuity Solutions, Dimino says he and his team were using a complicated spreadsheet that he built to tip out employees.

There were different fields for different prompts; you’d put in people’s names, job information, and all of these other fields through manual data entry,” Dimino says. “Any time you do that, there will be potential for error, whether it’s transposing numbers, putting the wrong thing in the wrong field—there’s a million different things that could happen. (These solutions) eliminate that 100%.”

Reducing errors is crucial in preventing payment complications from interfering with employee satisfaction. Switching to instant digital tip payouts has also helped Hop City overcome specific obstacles when dealing with long weekends or space rentals. In the past, if they rented out their rooftop area and had a large influx of tips coming in on a holiday weekend, employees may not have seen those tips until the following Wednesday if that Monday had been a bank holiday. With Branch & Gratuity Solutions, Dimino doesn’t have to worry about situations like these, and can reliably pay his employees every day.

Allowing Hop City employees to access their tips after each night—and save managers time and hassle in the process—has been a huge improvement for the entire Hop City crew.

We’re super happy with the Branch and Gratuity Solutions partnership—both of them work together really well. And that makes my job easier, and my manager’s jobs easier because we keep a happy staff. We’ve gotten zero negative feedback on it, which has been awesome. It’s been very very smooth.”

Learn more about Branch x Gratuity Solutions here.