Running Payroll

Payday shouldn't mean a shoebox of scribbled timecards and a calculator. Because your team already clocks in and out right on the POS, TORO has been quietly adding up everyone's hours, tips, and commission all pay period long. When it's time to pay people, the Payroll module gathers all of that up, lets you review and fix anything that looks off, and then emails a clean summary straight to your payroll company.

One thing to set expectations up front: TORO does not cut the actual paychecks. It isn't a check printer or a direct-deposit service. What it does is the tedious part — collecting and totaling everyone's hours and pay — and then hands that finished summary to whoever runs your payroll (a payroll company, a bookkeeper, or your accountant). Think of TORO as the person who preps the numbers, and your payroll rep as the person who writes the checks.

All of these numbers come from the time clock, so if you haven't already, it's worth reading Clocking In and Out first — that's where the hours and cash tips originate.

Opening Payroll

1. Open the Dashboard

2. Click the Employees tab on the left

3. Click the Payroll Module card (can't find it? Type "payroll" in the search box at the top right)

That opens the Payroll hub, a simple menu of big buttons: Do Payroll, View Logged Employee Hours, View Payroll Period Records, View Salary Weeks for Employee, and Settings.

First time here? TORO will ask "How many weeks are in your payroll period?" — most shops answer 1 (weekly) or 2 (every two weeks). Enter your number and you're set. You can change it later in Settings, and if you skip it, TORO defaults to 2 weeks.

If the Payroll card shows an OFF badge, the module has been switched off in Settings. It's on by default; see Turning Payroll On or Off below.

Viewing an Employee's Hours

This is the screen you'll use most — a running record of who worked when, and what they're owed.

1. From the Payroll hub, click View Logged Employee Hours

2. At the top, set a Start Date and Ending Date to choose the stretch of time you want to look at

3. Click Find Employee to pick a specific person, or Show All to see everyone at once

4. Click Refresh and the table fills in with every shift — clock-in time, clock-out time, hours worked, pay rate, tips, and commission

When you have a single employee selected, the totals box on the right adds everything up: total Hours, Paid wages, Cash Tips, Credit Tips, Commission, and a grand Total. There's also an Extra field where you can tack on a one-off amount (a bonus, say) to see how it changes the totals.

One important note: those totals only count shifts that have already been paid. Hours that haven't been run through payroll yet won't show up in the totals box, even though you can see the shifts themselves in the table.

Fixing a Punch

Somebody forgot to clock out, or clocked in an hour early by mistake? You can correct it here.

1. Click the shift in the table to select it

2. Click Edit (or just double-click the row)

3. The Edit Hours window opens, where you can adjust the Clock In Time and Clock Out Time, set the Rate, and enter Cash Tips and Credit Tips

4. Click Apply to save your changes

A few things worth knowing about this window:

• If a shift has already been paid, its times and amounts are locked — you can't quietly rewrite history on a check that's already gone out. If you genuinely need a change on a paid entry, use the Message Support button and we'll help.

• The View Notes buttons show any notes the employee typed when they clocked in or out (like "running late, flat tire").

• Unassign Payment Type pulls a shift back out of a payroll run if you assigned it by accident (as long as it hasn't actually been paid yet).

• Delete Payroll Entry removes a punch entirely — use this sparingly.

The Find Employee, Show All, and Edit buttons only appear for managers who have permission to view and edit other people's time sheets. A regular employee opening this screen sees only their own hours.

Doing Payroll

This is the main event — bundling up a pay period's hours and sending them to your payroll rep.

Before your first payroll: TORO needs to know who the payroll summary gets emailed to, so Do Payroll won't open until Payroll Contact Name and Payroll Contact Email are filled in under Settings. If you don't use an outside payroll company, put your own name and email address in those two fields — the payroll will simply come to you, and you can forward it to your bookkeeper or work from it yourself.

1. From the Payroll hub, click Do Payroll (the wide button across the top). This opens the Assign Shifts & Send Payroll window.

2. On the left is a list of employees with unpaid hours. Click the employees you want to include — their unassigned shifts appear in the table in the middle.

3. Look over the shifts. If something needs fixing before it goes out, select it and click Edit Selected Entry. (Yellow rows have a note attached — hover over them to read it.)

4. Select the shifts you want to pay, then click Assign Selected to Next Payroll. The shifts move down into the Payroll Information section as a check for that employee. The counter keeps track of how many shifts you've assigned and how many are still unassigned.

5. Repeat until every shift you intend to pay has been assigned. (Made a mistake? Just close the window and reopen it — that resets the whole session so you can start clean.)

6. In the Payroll Information panel, set the Payroll Date and, if you like, type an Extra Note to Representative — anything you want your payroll company to see this cycle.

7. Click Send Payroll to Rep.

When you send, TORO double-checks that you didn't leave shifts unassigned by accident and warns you if you did. Then the exact email and its spreadsheet attachment pop open for review — the email your payroll representative will receive, with every employee's hours, tips, commission, and bonus laid out in clean tables plus a verification-totals table at the bottom, and a CSV spreadsheet of the same numbers that rides along as an attachment (it opens in Excel, so your rep can import it straight into their payroll software). Give both a once-over, confirm they look right, and come back to TORO. The finished pay period is saved as a record you can look back at any time.

Where does the pay rate come from? Each employee's hourly rate is set on their employee profile, and TORO applies it automatically. Credit card tips and commission are calculated for you from the actual sales; cash tips are whatever the employee entered when they clocked out. You can override any of these on a shift in the Edit Hours window before you send.

A Note on Salaried Employees

If you pay someone a flat salary instead of by the hour, TORO tracks their weeks a little differently. From the Payroll hub, View Salary Weeks for Employee lets you pick a salaried person and see their hours grouped by week against the hours they're expected to work, along with a running scorecard of which pay periods came in on target. Salaried staff need a salary start date set on their profile for this to work. If you're not sure how your salaried team should be handled, reach out to Support and we'll walk you through it.

Viewing Past Payroll Records

Every payroll run you send is saved. To revisit one:

1. From the Payroll hub, click View Payroll Period Records. This opens the Payroll Periods window.

2. Use the Start and End date filters to narrow down the list

3. Select a period and click View Payroll Period (or double-click it) to see exactly what was sent — the date it was processed, the period it covered, and every employee check inside it

4. From there, Resend Payroll re-sends that same summary email to your rep if the original got lost

5. If a period was created in error, Delete Payroll Period removes it (TORO tells you how many checks it contains first, so you don't delete the wrong one)

You can also drill into a single employee's checks from the View Logged Employee Hours screen: select one of their shifts and click View Check to see which payroll check it landed on.

Seeing Tips and Commissions Per Hour Worked

Payroll tells you what each person was paid. If you want to step back and ask a different question — what does an hour behind the counter actually earn in credit card tips or commission? — there's a report for exactly that.

Open Advanced Reporting, go to the Operations tab, and pick Tips & Commissions. TORO asks two questions before it runs: which stretch of time, and which people.

For the time, there are ready-made choices — the last 3 months, 6 months or 12 months, the year so far, everything on record, or your own start and end dates. Underneath them TORO spells out the exact dates it settled on, so "the last 6 months" is never a guess.

Then pick your people. The list only offers employees who actually worked in the stretch you chose, so a three-month window shows the handful of people on the schedule rather than everyone who has ever worked for you. Each name comes with how many shifts they worked, their hours, what they earned in tips and commission and when they last worked — so you can see who's worth looking at before you tick anything. Choose one person, choose three to compare them side by side, or press Select All for the whole team.

What comes back is two graphs and the numbers behind them. The first graph tracks tips over time, the second tracks commission, each with one line per person, so a good stretch or a slide shows up as a shape rather than a number you have to hunt for. TORO picks the spacing to suit the stretch you asked for — day by day for a short window, week by week for a few months, month by month for a year or more. Below the graphs, one row per employee gives their days, hours, credit card tips, cash tips, commission and the per-hour average of each, and a period-by-period table shows the same figures broken down the same way the graph plots them.

Two things worth knowing: the numbers come from the same time clock records payroll uses, so they'll always agree with your payroll summaries — and if you ever see a dash instead of a per-hour figure, it means tips or commission were recorded on a shift with no hours logged (it happens with older records), so there's no honest hourly number to show.

If you pick a lot of people at once, the graphs draw the twelve who earned the most and say so — twelve lines is about as many as a chart can show and still be read. Everyone you picked is still listed in full in the tables underneath.

This report is part of Advanced Reporting's Enterprise tier, and like any report it can be added to your scheduled report emails.

A Few Key Settings

Click Settings on the Payroll hub to open Payroll Settings. This is where you tell TORO about your payroll company and how your pay periods work:

• Payroll Contact Name, Email, Phone, and Account Number — who the payroll summary gets emailed to, and your account number with them. The email address here is where Send Payroll to Rep sends. The Name and Email are required — Do Payroll won't open without them. No outside payroll company? Enter your own name and email and the payroll comes to you.

• Weeks in Payroll Period — 1 for weekly, 2 for every-other-week, and so on. This is the same number TORO asked you about the very first time you opened Payroll.

• Payroll Start Date — the anchor date TORO counts your pay periods from. Set this to the start of one of your real pay periods and everything lines up.

• Email preface paragraphs and a default note — optional standing text that appears at the top of every payroll email, so you don't have to retype the same instructions to your rep each time.

• Subject Prefix and Subject Suffix — optional text added to the beginning and end of the payroll email's subject line. Handy if your payroll company asks for a client code or keyword in the subject so their system files it automatically.

• Payroll Module Enabled — the master on/off switch. Leave it checked to use payroll. Unchecking it hides payroll throughout TORO (and puts that OFF badge on the Dashboard card).

Click Save when you're done.