Where tips go
A customer adds a tip when they pay. What that tip is to your business decides where it lands on your statements, and LawnLedger lets you say which - once, for the whole organization, with a date it takes effect.
The setting is in Settings → Finances → Books, on the Tips card, and
needs accounting.manage. Reading it is Growth and up;
changing it is part of the full accounting layer (the native ledger, nativeLedger, which is included in Growth). New organizations start on business income,
which is also how every tip was recorded before the setting existed.
The three choices
| You choose | What a tip becomes | Where it shows |
|---|---|---|
| Business income | Money you earned, like the service itself | With service revenue on the P&L, in the Tips account (4200) |
| Other income | Still yours, but not what you charge for | Below operating income on the P&L, in Tips (Other Income) (4210), so your service margin reads clean |
| Held for the crew | The crew’s money, which you are holding for them | Never revenue. A liability in Tips Payable (2350) until you pay it out, and the Tips report tracks what you still owe |
Each choice posts to a built-in account by default. If your chart already has an account for tips - say a liability called “Crew tips owed” - pick it instead; the picker only offers accounts of the right kind for the choice you made.
It takes effect on a date
Pick the day the new treatment starts. Payments on or after that day follow it; every tip recorded before keeps the treatment it was recorded under. The day has to be today or later and cannot fall inside a locked period. Changes stack up as history, and a change that has not taken effect yet can be cancelled.
A policy is never edited in place, on purpose. Each tip’s treatment is frozen on the payment the day it is recorded, which is what lets a rebuild of the books reproduce exactly what posted. If you need a past tip somewhere else, that is a journal entry, not a policy change.
Moving what is already on the books
When the account changes, the card offers to move the open balance as of the effective date: one adjusting journal entry from the old account to the new one, for the fiscal-year-to-date balance of an income account or the full balance of a liability. You can reverse it later from the journal. It moves what is on the books at that moment; a payment recorded afterwards and dated earlier stays where its own date puts it.
Paying the crew
Under Held for the crew, the Tips report (Reports → Tips) gains a Record tip payout button. A payout names the amount, the day, the bank or cash account the money left, the crew member if you track that, and a memo. It posts against Tips Payable, and the report’s Balance owed to crew is the books’ own figure for that account - the ceiling for the next payout. A payout recorded in error is voided, never deleted; the books reverse it on its own day.
The Tips report
Whatever you chose, the Tips report shows tips received and refunded by month and by job - a tip follows the paid invoice’s job, and the crew assigned to that job is listed beside it - plus the payouts and what is still owed. Tips on an invoice with no job appear as unattributed.
On the Profit and loss summary, tips held for the crew appear as a memo line under revenue so you can see where that money went; they are not added to any total.