Tronc is the process of distributing weekly tips earned to the relevant employees, either based on the number of hours worked, points earned or a fixed rate per employee. Tronc payments are taxed differently from normal basic wages and therefore should be treated separately.
Tronc schemes
There are different ways that your organisation may distribute tips:
Hours worked: the amount of tips someone receives is based on the number of hours they have worked in a week (e.g. the more hours someone works, the greater share of the tronc they’ll receive).
Points based: the amount of tips someone receives is based on the number of hours they have worked in a week (as above) and their Tronc points (e.g. the more points and hours someone earns, the greater share of the tronc they’ll receive).
The number of points assigned to someone is an individual setting per employee and can be based on things such as performance, length of service or seniority.
Fixed-rate: someone receives a fixed hourly or weekly Tronc amount, regardless of the number of hours they work (e.g. someone always receives £2.00 Tronc per hour they work each week).
This means that your Tronc balance may go into a negative or positive balance, depending on the total amount of tips received in a week.
👀 Have a watch of our Spotlight Session 'Tronc - some helpful tips' for more information.
Using Tronc
Tronc runs on a weekly basis and uses signed-off data only, so you must ensure that the weeks for all relevant sites and departments have been signed-off before starting this process.
⚠️ Tronc must be configured with the relevant scheme and sites before you can start entering your tips. You must also have the relevant permissions assigned to your account to access the Tronc module, just reach out to our support team to get set up.
Click Rotas then Tronc
Enter the total tips made for each day
Rotaready will calculate the amount of tronc that will be distributed to each employee based on the scheme enabled. You may update a colleague's tronc rate or points here, along with making supplementary discretionary payments.
Click the mark for approval button
Click the lock button
You can update someone's Tronc rate within their pay record or directly using the Tronc tool.
❗️ Locking Tronc will do a number of things, including locking the data for the week and opening next week's Tronc page, along with pushing the amounts payable through to payroll reports. Although it is possible to reverse this, be cautious when doing so that payroll hasn't already been processed.
Tronc mappings
By default, each department's tronc is managed separately. An exception is if an employee does a cover shift in another site / department, when your settings may mean they get a share of the tips from the department they've covered in.
Depending on the structure of your business, you may instead wish for tips to be pooled from multiple departments and shared between the employees across those departments. Tronc mappings facilitate this by selecting the departments whose employees should appear on the master department's tronc. The tronc is then administered from this master department. This is particularly common with hotels, where there are usually a higher number of departments in each site.
Tronc tools
There are a number of reports and tools that can assist you in checking and processing Tronc payments.
Tronc status report: an overview of the status of each site/department's Tronc per week.
Payroll Export: the total amount of Tronc received will appear on a secondary row per employee once the Tronc week has been locked. You can use a filter to include/exclude Tronc amounts from this report.