We have a retail operation. In the US, tipping is common. For those unfamiliar with the practice because (perhaps) it is not done in the area you live in, I’ll explain.
Tips are common in restaurants and personal services, such as beauty salons. There are others, but I cannot think of them at the moment. The idea is that if the customer gets decent service, the customer will add an additional amount of money to pay on top of the billed amount. E.g., let’s say someone gets a haircut and they think it is just the bee’s knees, they might say, hey, I’ll throw a tip on for the stylist who cut my hair! Perhaps the haircut costs $12, so maybe they will tip $3, bringing the total at the checkout register to $15 paid. And they might pay cash, debit, credit, check or any other form of payment for this – the tip is simply included as part of the total.
I know that in Kiwi and some other countries, tipping is almost unknown, other than US customers (and others) who visit on vacation. Kiwis are surprised when presented with a tip (or maybe they just pretend, just gobbling it up, idk), because it is not expected, customary, or common.
The problem is that we cannot simply add a standard item to the inventory for this because the amount is typically a percentage (or close percentage) of the cost of the base cost (the total of the other items purchased). And a negative discount would be rather confusing for this purpose.
What I have done as a workaround is to create an inventory item called “tips” and I gave it a base price of $1. Then all I have to do is enter how many units of $1 tips. So a $3 tip would be 3 units of tip inventory item. Likewise, $3.50 tip would be 3.5 units, and so on.
This is clever at best and sort of clumsy and not very polished and professional. It does, however, allow me to move on with my bookkeeping (customers don’t see most of this because we use a separate system for actual shop POS). I am hoping there is a better way to do this, maybe something so simple I just overlooked the possibility.
TIA.