Who Gets the Tip on a Toast Delivery Services Order?
Toast keeps the tip on every Toast Delivery Services order and pays it to the courier. Here's how to spot those orders, why they throw off tip pools, and which delivery money is actually yours to pay out.
If your restaurant uses Toast Delivery Services, some of the tips in your reports probably aren’t what they look like. A customer orders delivery, adds a generous tip, and the check lands under one of your servers, so it’s natural to assume that server earned it. The tip never belonged to anyone on your staff, though. Toast keeps it and pays it to the courier who made the delivery. Once you know what to look for, these orders are easy to spot, and keeping them out of your tip pools and payroll is straightforward.
What Toast does with the tip
Toast Delivery Services, or TDS, is Toast’s own delivery network. Instead of hiring drivers, you hand each order to a courier from DoorDash Drive or Uber Direct, and Toast takes care of dispatching them and billing you for it. Toast’s support pages are clear about the tip: it goes to the driver. For every delivery, Toast withholds the delivery fee and the driver’s tip from your daily credit card payout, and it tells restaurants to deduct those tips from their card tips before paying their own staff.
In other words, the money was never yours to share. It shows up in Toast because the customer paid it through your restaurant, but it leaves with your payout before you ever see it.
Why these tips are easy to get wrong
Toast tracks every TDS tip under an employee called TDS Driver, which it creates in your account automatically. TDS Driver has its own job, Delivery Service Driver, and never needs to clock in. That part is simple enough. The confusion comes from who appears as the server. When someone on your staff takes a delivery order over the phone and rings it in at the POS, they become the server on that check, and their name ends up sitting right next to a tip they’ll never receive. At one restaurant we looked at, about four out of every five TDS orders over two months were rung in by staff this way, so the withheld tips were scattered across whoever happened to answer the phone.
How to tell a TDS order apart
The reliable signal is the order’s dining option. Every TDS order uses the Toast Delivery Services dining option, no matter who rang it in or where it came from. The server’s name won’t tell you, and neither will a delivery address, since orders from DoorDash and Uber Eats have addresses too. If you’re reviewing tips by hand, filter your orders by the Toast Delivery Services dining option and set those tips aside before you do anything else with them.
Online pickup orders are a different story
If you take online orders through a partner like Popmenu, Toast often lists TDS Driver as the server on those orders as well, including ordinary pickups that never involve a courier, and those pickup tips are real. The customer tipped your restaurant, the money arrives in your payout like any other card tip, and it belongs to your staff under whatever tip rules you follow. Many restaurants send online order tips to a host or to-go pool, which works fine as long as that pool includes TDS Driver’s role, Delivery Service Driver.
So the same placeholder employee can hold two very different kinds of money on the same day: delivery tips that Toast keeps, and pickup tips that you need to pay out. Again, the dining option is what separates them.
Fees are not tips
Delivery and online orders often carry fees too, like a delivery fee you charge the guest or a small fee a partner such as Popmenu adds to each order. These are service charges rather than tips, and the business keeps them. If you’d like to understand where that line falls in general, our guide on service charges and tips walks through it.
What about DoorDash, Uber Eats and Grubhub?
Orders from the big delivery apps work differently again. The customer tips inside the app, and that tip never passes through Toast, so these orders usually come into Toast with a tip of $0. There’s nothing to pool and nothing to set aside. If a tip ever does come through on one of these orders, treat it like an online pickup tip, because it reached your restaurant.
What this means for your tip pools and payroll
If you work out tips from Toast reports, TDS tips can quietly inflate your numbers. Servers who ring in delivery orders look like they earned more than they did, and if their tips feed a pool, everyone in that pool gets a share of money that was never there. Payroll can then pay out tips your restaurant never collected, and that comes straight out of your pocket.
The fix is to take TDS tips out first, before pooling, before moving tips between staff, and before payroll. Pickup tips from online partners, on the other hand, should stay in, even when the server is TDS Driver.
How QuickSpice handles this
QuickSpice reads the dining option on every order, so tips on Toast Delivery Services orders never reach a person, a pool, a tip redistribution or a payroll file. They’re shown beside your totals as withheld by Toast, so you can still see exactly which checks Toast kept and how much.
Online pickup tips that name TDS Driver are handled like anyone else’s: they go to whichever pool takes TDS Driver’s role, or stay where a manager can redistribute them to the right person. Delivery fees and partner fees stay with the business. The Tips page explains each of these cases right where your managers see the numbers, so nobody has to guess why a total looks the way it does.