Figuring out TIps

Death of Rats

For those of you who've been kinda keeping up with my woes through my advice threads, I have a job now. I'm a delivery driver for Pizza Hut. Fortunately enough this job acutally pays better than most would expect. However, I do have one problem, my income is based on tips.

Unfortunately I'm really bad with money. If it's in my wallet, I want to spend it. Now, I've been able to pay my bills and all that, but I am getting tired of not knowing exactly how much money I'm actually making a month. I just don't keep track of my tips well at all. Sometimes I make $10 an hour off of my tips, sometimes I don't. I just don't keep track of it at all.

And I want to. I want to be able to look back on a month and go "hey, I made this much money... and this is what I spent it on". Not only would it just be nice info to have, but actually seeing how much I made and knowing where it went might help me get my priorities straight so I can get my financial problems straightened out.

Unfortunately programs like Quicken just aren't built for these things. I think I actually need some sort of spreadsheet or something.

Here's what I want to be able to do:

• Enter in how many hours I worked on a day, and how much money in tips I made that day
• Enter in exactly what I bought on a day, and how much it cost (not "gas station: $-3.00", but "soda: $-1.50, candy $-1.20, tax $-0.30")
• have a visual representation of where my money goes
• have a calender that shows my total profit for a day

Basically, I want to be able to enter in what I've made in a day, how long it took me to make it, and what I've spent in a day, and what on. Then, I want a calleneder that shows five numbers, what I made that day, how many hours it took to make it, how much I spent that day, the running total for the week, and the running total for the month. It would also be awesome if I could compair months/weeks (possibly a graph that shows average tips per hour for each day, or something like that).

I plan on starting to put all my money I don't spend in the bank once a week (I only use my bank account to pay bills. All my food/gas expenses are taken care of by the tips), so something like this would be really useful for me to figure out what's going on with me finacially.

Does anyone know of a program that does this, or know how I could go about making one? I'm not that good with excel or access, but if that's the only way I could get something like this, I'd be willing to learn.

Burtletoy

Excel.

garroad_ran

Excel, certainly. I use "Numbers" on my mac. It's just as good.

ApexMirage

Excel is simple enough to pick up, really. I picked up the basics in a few weeks of class (with class once a week >_>) and could probably whip something up, minus the calendar/graphs. I'm incredibly swamped as it is though and I'm sure just about anyone here will have more know-how then I do =p

Also I dont know if its a problem you have, but back when i did deliveries, I'd sometimes just completely lose track of how much I made that day. I picked up the habit of dropping any money i have at home before work so that i know exactly what my figure is at the end of the shift, which was incredibly handy.

Thanatos

Excel or OpenOffice's spreadsheet program (Calc, maybe?).

Blake T

Yeah it's called Calc.

Really your problem seems to be once you get home you should take all of you tip money out of your wallet, stick it in a tin or something and bank it all once a week.

rfalias

It would be pretty easy in excel. If you have excel I can whip up something that will calculate it all out if you arent too sure how to set it up. It would have you enter the hours worked, then show you how much you made based on hourly wages, then you could enter tips and expenses and have it calculate out for you.

Or if you want to do it by your self, I'm sure we'd all be glad to help. Though I don't know how OOO's Calc works.

Erios

Save your receipts. That will help keep track of total expenditures.

Cauld

I used to be a pizza delivery driver. There was another driver who kept a notebook in his car. He'd write down his tip after every delivery. Now, that was a little extreme to me, but it shouldn't be hard for you to write it down after every shift. Even if you just put it in your cell phone somewhere until you get home, it helps. Also, I'm sure you do this already, but be sure to separate your money from your tips while you're working otherwise it gets all confusing. You do go through money faster as a delivery driver. I used to have to buy gas every other day.

Improvolone

I use Calc to keep a spreadsheet of all of my income/outcome. I've been keeping it since August. I keep every receipt that I get and put it in to one of the many categories that I have. The hardest part is not getting bogged down with receipts. I have Calc put all of the items that I want to keep an eye on into a line graph, so that I can see how much they are fluctuating (if at all). I haven't figured out the real tricks to the program yet, I'm just using it for very surface level info. In most of the cells I am just adding to the equation +NEW NUMBER. In some of my cells I deal with addition or subtraction.

I would gladly post my Calc file so that you can see it/use it, but I have no idea how to host a file that isn't an image.

To keep track of your tips, I would absolutely have a notebook in your car.

Ganluan

I was a delivery driver several years ago, and I remember asking the manager the best way to keep track of my tips since the computer required them to be entered before you could clock out.

He said "just put in a couple dollars for each hour you're here". I didn't realize the implications back then, but that could've screwed me

EggyToast

Small notepad, you can keep it in the car with you. Every night (or every delivery, as mentioned above), write down how much you made.

Sure, you can use a spreadsheet, set up this automated macro to calculate tips per day or how much you spent out of your tips on the latest woot-off. But it's hard to beat the immediacy of a pad of paper that you can just scribble how much you made each night.

I prefer just writing stuff like this down because you create a permanent log, and there's no reason to avoid doing it just because you don't feel like booting up Excel that night.

Wootloops

I think I could help you out - I keep a spreadsheet of my earnings / hours / expenses due to working in a Restaurant. When handling cash it's really easy to just spend it without realizing. I found that keeping one of these not only helped me save some cash, it also gave me an exact amount of what I was pulling home each week and what my finances should look like.

PM me if you like, I can email the set up to you. It's pretty much just plug in the details and a few formulas will do the rest for you. There's plenty of guys here with similar set ups, though. Good luck.

Jaded

I drew up an excel document that matches the requirements you had in your PM. Tried to send you my email address but your Inbox is full. When you can toss me a PM and I'll send you my email address so you can get the file.

Shogun

I used an app for my iphone when I was a driver called Pocket Money. I still use it though I'm not a driver anymore but now I serve.

Unknown

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Pulvaan

small pocketbook would actually be good for you. Write things down as soon as you get it, and you won't forget. You can also take it with you to your job, which you can't do with excel.

YourFatAuntSusan

Here's a good budget spreadsheet (.xls) I use that would be easily converted to work for your purpose.

http://www.yarlan.com/PABUDGET.xls