Tips on car wraps, ceramic coatings, and high-end detail jobs are real money — 5-15% of ticket on premium work. Here's what SalesThumb actually does with them and what's still on you.
What customers tip
- Detail: 10-20% on premium services; almost universal
- Tint: 5-10%; less universal but common on luxury vehicles
- PPF: 3-8%; less common but real on $5,000+ jobs
- Ceramic coating: 5-10% on high-end coatings
- Wrap: 3-8%; varies wildly by market
How SalesThumb captures tips
There are three places a customer can add a tip, all live by default with nothing to configure:
- Invoice → Collect payment — when staff collect a card payment on an invoice, the payment dialog shows a None / 15% / 18% / 20% / Other row before the charge. (Note: Quick Sale is a separate flow with its own free-text dollar tip field — it doesn't use this preset row.)
- Customer portal invoice — when a customer pays their invoice from their phone, the same None / 15% / 18% / 20% / Other row appears, labeled "the whole tip goes to your tech."
- "Leave a tip" on the photo gallery link — customers can send a standalone tip straight to the tech from the public photo-gallery/reschedule page for the appointment, separate from paying the invoice. This surface uses flat dollar presets — $5 / $10 / $20 / $50 — plus a custom amount, not percentages.
Each of these creates a tip entry tied to the technician on the job — the full amount, no splitting or routing rules. If you want to pool tips across a crew instead of crediting the named installer, that has to happen outside SalesThumb today; there's no pool/share-rules or distribution-model setting.
Where to track and pay out tips
- Reports → Tips Report shows tips collected per installer for the date range, broken into paid-out vs. not-yet-paid-out. There's no CSV export directly on this report.
- Reports → Payroll Summary rolls tips into each employee's pay for the period (Hours, Commission, Tips, Est. Pay) and has a CSV export button — this is the report to hand off for payroll.
SalesThumb reads out per-tech attributable revenue and commission for a pay period; it doesn't run payroll or move money to staff. You still cut the check or run it through your payroll provider — SalesThumb's job is giving you the accurate numbers to feed in, not auto-syncing to Gusto, Rippling, ADP, or similar. There's no built-in payroll-provider connection today.
Tax treatment
This is where shops mess up.
### For W-2 employees - Tips are taxable wages - Must be reported on the employee's W-2 (Box 7 + Box 8) - Subject to FICA, FUTA, and federal/state withholding - Employer pays the employer-side FICA on the tipped amount - IRS form 8027 if your shop has 10+ employees
### For 1099 contractors - Tips paid through your shop should be reported on the contractor's 1099-NEC - No employer-side FICA (contractor pays self-employment tax) - Document the payment as part of their non-employee compensation
### For cash tips received directly by employees - Employees should report cash tips to you monthly (IRS Form 4070) - Add to W-2 wages - Many shops ignore this. They shouldn't.
Talk to a CPA. The IRS pays particular attention to tip reporting in service industries — SalesThumb doesn't file anything on your behalf here.
Common mistakes
- Not reporting tips as wages — IRS audit risk
- Letting tips sit unpaid for months — check the Tips Report's unpaid column regularly so nothing lingers
- Hidden cash tips — never sustainable; staff resent it; tax exposure
- No documented policy for split jobs — since SalesThumb credits the single installer on the appointment, decide up front (in writing) how multi-tech jobs share a tip, since the software won't split it for you
Have a written tip policy. Share it. Stick to it.