Every month, someone sits down with a spreadsheet, a rota and a pile of card receipts and tries to work out who earned what in tips. It’s slow, it’s easy to get wrong, and when it goes wrong, your team notices first. Add new tipping legislation in the UK and Ireland, and those manual workarounds stop being an admin headache. They become a real business risk. We sat down with James Fahy, co-founder and CEO of JustTip, to talk about why getting tips right matters more than ever, and what changes when your systems talk to each other.
For years, the default answer to messy admin has been one platform that does everything. For shift-based businesses, that rarely works out. All-in-one tools tend to do lots of things reasonably well and very few brilliantly. Tips and tronc are a specialist area, with their own rules, formulas and legal requirements.
The alternative is to pick the best tool for each job and connect them. Your workforce management system knows who worked, when and for how long. A specialist tronc platform knows how tips should be shared and how to stay compliant. Connect the two and the data flows on its own, with no re-keying.
That’s what we mean by More Power: the freedom to build a tech stack that fits how you actually run. Bizimply connects with [ADD STAT: number of integration partners] platforms, so your rota and timesheets become the single source of truth everything else relies on.
As James put it, operators can stick with “the battle of the spreadsheets, which we’ve seen for years, or you can move to a solution like the two of us have built together, which is the unified solution, which means it just happens in the background.”
Meet JustTip
JustTip is a tipping and tronc platform used by hundreds of hospitality businesses across the UK and Ireland. James Fahy and Ciara Walsh founded it in 2020, when two experiences came together. James wanted to leave a tip by card but couldn’t be sure it would reach the person who served him. Ciara, working in Dublin hospitality, was handed a brown envelope each week with no idea how her share had been worked out. Today, JustTip pays tips directly to staff, and many operators run it alongside Bizimply, using the integration to pull hours straight across.
Take one joint Bizimply and JustTip customer in Dublin with around 150 staff. Like most hospitality businesses now, they take the vast majority of their payments by card, and a good share of those transactions carry a tip or service charge. That money has to be shared fairly, and someone has to do the sharing.
For this business, that meant three to four days every month. The CFO, the finance director and the accounts team were all pulled in to answer the same questions for every member of staff. As James described it: “Think about the CFO, the FD, and the accounts team getting involved to try and just figure out first of all who is James, what shifts did he work? What’s his hours this week? What’s his hours this month?”
Then come the calculations, and then the corrections, because “there’s errors when you bring human into the loop.” Every mistake lands in someone’s pay, and staff notice.
"They're phenomenally big for the staff, but they're a pain for the business."
The stakes have risen too. With new tipping legislation in the UK and Ireland, James explained that a UK business “is carrying 5,366 pounds per employee in liability if you’re caught in breach.” For a team of just 10, that’s over £50,000 of potential risk.
Connecting Bizimply and JustTip turns that monthly scramble into an end-to-end flow. The hours already recorded in Bizimply feed straight into JustTip, which works out each person’s share and pays them directly, with a payslip. The finance team’s job shrinks to clicking approve, or switching on auto approve.
In James’s words: “Having an end-to-end flow, it just saves that entire process.”
That’s three to four days a month handed back to senior people who should be running the business, not chasing timesheets.
Practical Takeaways
- Don’t assume you’re compliant. With card payments now the norm, tips run through your business, and so does the liability. Check your current process against the latest UK and Irish rules.
- Keep the business out of the tips. Moving tips around internally or sending spreadsheets back and forth to a troncmaster creates employer involvement, which can put your NIC exemption at risk. Look for a partner who takes that risk off your hands.
- Let hours drive payouts. Connect your tronc platform to your workforce management system so tips are calculated from real shift data, not re-keyed by hand.
How the integration works
When a guest pays £100 and adds a £10 tip, JustTip, which is integrated with the card machine, picks up the transaction data and the tip lands in JustTip’s accounts. JustTip then pulls staff and hours data from Bizimply and applies whichever formula the business has chosen: hours per shift, hours per day, an equal split, or a set percentage to the server. Each employee is paid automatically, with a payslip. The business simply clicks approve, or turns on auto approve.
Getting started is quick. Bizimply customers can sign up at justtip.co.uk or speak to their Bizimply account manager. The two accounts are linked, staff are pulled across into JustTip and hours feed through automatically. James puts setup at around 10 minutes.
Tips matter enormously to your team, but they shouldn’t take days out of your month. When your workforce data and your tronc platform are connected, fair and compliant tip payouts just happen. This is what’s possible when work connects. Watch the full conversation with James, and explore the JustTip integration to get started.
