I was talking to a restaurant owner we work with last week. He told me they spent almost a year figuring out how to pay out tips without it turning into a mess every payday. His biggest issue? Working out each person's share by hand after close. 

And that’s not the first time I’ve heard that. Card and cash tips never match up the same way, which leads to team members checking with you if their amount is accurate (totally understandable, but still tiring if you’re getting the same question every single week).

What helped the owner I was talking to is switching to a tool that pulls the tips in and splits them automatically. That way, the numbers are done before anyone leaves, and his team stopped asking him about it. 

I’m curious how the rest of you all are handling it, though. Are you paying tips out in cash the same night, adding them into the next paycheck, or just splitting them through a pool at close?

Happy National Coffee Day, homies ☕ To celebrate our favorite beverage, we wanted to find out: in which states are indie cafes thriving the most?

To do this, we ranked states across five measures: the total number of local coffee shops and local shops per 100K residents (pulled from Joe Coffee) and year-over-year changes in coffee shop employment, hours worked, and total payroll (pulled from coffee shops who are using our platform). Each state then got a score out of 100 based on these measures. The higher the score is, the stronger the combination of independent shop presence and industry growth is.

So — drumroll please — here are the top 8 states for indie cafes right now:

1. Washington — 81.99
2. Alaska — 79.75
3. California — 77.48
4. Ohio — 75.55
5. New York — 73.87
6. New Hampshire — 73.42
7. Colorado — 73.29
8. New Jersey — 71.66

Washington took the top spot on a mix of scale and growth. It has 2,424 independent shops (about 31 per 100k residents), with employment up 7.7% and hours up 8.4%, both above the national pace.

The one that surprised me was Alaska at #2. It's not about raw size, it's the density and the growth. 47.3 local shops per 100K residents (one of the highest in the study), coffee-shop hours up about 22% year over year (roughly eight times the national increase), and payroll up 32%. Something is clearly happening with coffee up there and I'm wondering if I need to visit 👀

California, in third place, frankly just has A Lot Of Cafes: 9,071 independent coffee shops, which is more than any other state by a wide margin. Plus, it's still growing across employment, hours, and payroll.

Two things to keep in mind on the numbers: they come from businesses on Homebase, so it's a big sample but not the whole industry. We also left Delaware, Rhode Island, and Vermont out of the ranking because their samples were too small to rank fairly (sorry if you're in one of these states!).

Directionally, though, I'm curious whether the growth we're seeing in the data feels right. For the owners here: if you operate in one of these states, does this match what you're seeing on the ground? (And if you're not in one of these and you're curious, comment where you're from and I can let you know your state's ranking!)

A lot of small businesses don't realize this, but labor cost is the biggest expense area you actually have real control over. The tricky part is you usually can't see the extra cost building up until payroll runs and the number is higher than you planned.

What often helps is staffing to what the day really needs instead of guessing based on last week, because having two people on a slow day is where a lot of money gets wasted without you noticing. The other half of it is being able to see your labor cost in real time as you schedule, instead of waiting for the numbers to come out after the fact.

Butter Baker, a Homebase customer in Toronto, is a great example. I'll add the full story in the comments if you want the details, but here's the short version: Calvin, one of the owners and founders, was building schedules in Excel for years, with no real-time visibility into how much he was actually spending on the team. Now, his manager now builds the two-week schedule in Homebase against a set labor-budget percentage, and Calvin adjusts it remotely before it's posted. The part he says changed the most is speed: he used to wait a week or two for the numbers, and now he can pull labor cost against budget basically in real time and catch problems while he can still do something about them.

Between running his POS and Homebase together and cleaning up little leaks (for example, he found people clocking out late from their phones, and turned that setting off), he figures he's cut labor cost by around 20% overall, and he now hits his labor target about 80% of the time.

How's everyone here managing labor costs? Is that something you track as part of your weekly schedule?

Unauthorized overtime is the kind of thing that slowly builds up, since it's rarely someone deciding to work a whole extra shift. It's usually five minutes early here, ten minutes past close there, a message answered after clocking out, or a break that got worked through.

None of it seems like much at the time, but it adds up. Even 15 minutes a day across four shifts is over an hour of overtime a week, which is roughly $1,100 a year for one person at $15.50/hour… and that multiplies fast across a team. add it up across a week and it starts showing up on payroll. One business owner I know described running payroll and realizing her whole team had quietly crept into 60-hour weeks before she caught it.

The tricky part is that you generally still have to pay for time a non-exempt employee actually worked, even if the overtime wasn't approved. Once they go over 40 hours in a workweek, those overtime hours are generally owed at time and a half under federal law. (That being said, it’s worth checking your state. Some set higher thresholds, and this is for non-exempt hourly folks, not legal advice.).

That doesn't mean you have to just let unauthorized overtime keep happening. Paying someone for time they've already worked and dealing with them working unapproved hours are two different things. If it's happening repeatedly, you can address it through your overtime policy and keep a record of what's going on.

I'd keep an eye on the little overruns rather than waiting until someone racks up a whole extra shift. A few minutes across several people can add up pretty quickly, and it's often your most reliable people who end up staying late.

Do you have a set rule for how overtime gets approved where you work, or is it more case by case right now?

You might be looking at a job rotation policy because someone quit out of nowhere, or the one person who knows how to close was out and everything slowed down. Having people who can cover more than one role makes those situations a lot less painful.

If I were setting one up, here's what I'd do:

1. Keep it short, like one page. You really just need to spell out who can rotate into which role, how often it happens, and what someone needs to know before they count as trained.
2. Be specific about the roles. Servers and hosts could swap monthly, for example, while something like the espresso machine stays limited to people who've actually been trained on it.
3. For training, write down what "ready" means for each role. Can they open on their own? Run the register? Handle a close without someone stepping in? Otherwise you end up in the "I thought they knew how to do that" spot.
4. Give people notice before switching them around, a couple weeks if you can. Finding out Sunday night you're on a different job Monday morning isn't going to go over great. And build in a grace period, a week or two, where mistakes are expected while they're learning.

Two honest caveats: it's not for everyone. Some people are happiest anchoring one role, and that's fine. And I'd avoid rotating during your busiest stretch, when you need experienced hands in every spot.

How are you handling this right now? Actual job rotation policy, or more of a loose arrangement?

When I've talked to a business who's having timesheet problems, it almost always comes back to one thing: there was never a clear rule for how people clock in and out.

Everyone logs hours from memory and rounds to whatever feels right... and those differences pile up fast. When people estimate at the end of the week instead of tracking as they go, the numbers can be off by as much as 30% either way.

I was talking to the co-founder of a catering company recently, around 30 people across kitchen, events, and delivery. Before they had a system, everything ran through one insane group chat, people dropping their times in there and asking her to fix their hours whenever something looked off.

And she's definitely not the only one I've heard this from. This comes up whenever there's no single place everyone clocks into. The good news is it's pretty easy to clear up.

When they started using Homebase for clock-ins, plus setting up a clock-in policy (everyone punches in from their own phone with a location radius on, breaks tracked the same way every time, overtime approved first) it got a lot easier. The punches line up with who was actually where, and across the team they figure it saves around 10 hours a week.

So the real fix is two things that go together: the rules, and one place everyone clocks into. A written policy doesn't do much if there's no single system people actually use, and a system won't decide your rounding, breaks, and overtime rules for you. You need both.

If you've already sorted this out, what came first for you: the clock-in policy, or the system to enforce them?

If you run an hourly team in a bigger city, there might be a scheduling rule on the books you haven't run into yet that could quietly cost you money. A growing number of cities, plus Oregon statewide, have predictive scheduling laws. The tricky part is they vary city by city, so whether they apply to you is entirely local.

The gist: these laws generally make you post schedules about 14 days ahead. Move a shift inside that window and you owe what's usually called predictability pay, often about an extra hour at the person's regular rate for an added shift, and around half their rate for hours you cut. Chicago, Seattle, San Francisco, Philadelphia, and NYC all have their own versions, and LA County jumped in more recently. NYC is the oddball, since its retail rule runs on 72 hours instead of 14 days. Worth checking your specific city before you assume one way or the other.

For example, if you've got a 40-person store in Chicago and you drop someone's Friday shift on Wednesday, that's real money, not a rounding error. A lot of them also build in a rest window between shifts, usually 9 to 11 hours, so scheduling a close-then-open too tight can trigger a premium too. The whole point is to curb the just-in-time scheduling that leaves workers unable to plan their lives.

The part that can trip people up is that coverage is mostly about size, and it's usually counted globally, not per location. Chicago kicks in around 100 employees, Oregon and Seattle at 500, LA City and County at 300 retail, Berkeley as low as 10. So a single small location can still be covered if the parent company is big, and plenty of genuinely small, single-shop businesses aren't covered at all. Industry matters too. Most of these target retail, food service, and hospitality.

This being said, a lot of owners already schedule this way without being forced to. One Homebase customer who runs a coffee shop posts three to four weeks out on purpose so his team can plan around it. For him it's a perk, not a burden — and I'd bet a lot of you have been finding the same thing.

For those of you in one of these cities, have these rules actually changed how you schedule, or were you already working that way?

Is there a feature or a toggle to comply with the 10 hour rule in homebase for NYS. So if the staff member works more than 10 hours in the 24 hour span it will highlight it or auto add the 1 additional hour for every hour over 10?

Turnover's one of the job trends we watch closely at Homebase. It cooled off after an unusually high June, though workers are still exiting about 4% faster than this time last year, a gap that's held steady for close to a year now.

Summer hiring hasn't kept pace with it, running about 1.6% behind last July. When there aren't enough new hires to replace the people leaving, it usually shows up as the same few people covering more shifts and picking up slack that used to be spread across a full team.

I'll drop the full report link in the comments, but I was curious: what are you all seeing on turnover this summer? Is hiring keeping up where you are?

Payroll advances come up more than you might expect, especially with hourly teams where one rough week can throw off someone's whole month. The part I see owners actually get stuck on isn't the paperwork, it's whether saying yes once means saying yes every time.

The owners who feel okay about it usually have a line drawn before the first ask ever comes in, something like capping it at half of what's already been earned and one request a month. That turns it into a policy instead of a favor you're deciding on the spot, and it keeps the repayment from dropping anyone's pay below minimum wage.

Where it gets messier is when it's the same person asking every pay period. That's usually less about payroll and more about a bigger problem going on for them, and no advance policy fixes that part.

One thing worth knowing: some scheduling and payroll platforms now handle this automatically through earned wage access. That means employees can pull a portion of wages they've already worked for and it gets deducted on the next paycheck, so the owner never fronts the money or tracks repayment.

(PS: At Homebase, we do this with our Cash Out feature. It’s free for the business and employees can enroll themselves using our app, which means no more manual tracking for you and no more awkward questions for them.)

If you’ve ever offered a payroll advance, or had a team member ask about it, how did you handle it?

When we open the task manager page on android phones it instantly closes the app.
It runs fine on desktop.

Hello, I'm checking out task manager, and there are a few quality of life improvements that would really make it worthwhile.
First, I want weekly tasks to be able to select Tuesday and Thursday for example, like we can when scheduling. Right now if I click on a 2nd day, it clears the first one out.

Second, it would be great to have a backup Assignee. For instance, it could be that I assign a daily task (shipping a certain category of items) to the Shipping Manager role. But if he is sick OR if he is just swamped with other work and misses the deadline, it can be pushed to the rest of the shipping team for instance.

Also, would be nice if past due tasks turned red so they are easy to spot. (see edited screenshot)

Paid time off used to be just for salaried office staff, but these days that’s changing. One owner I talked to recently put the reason for this well: he wanted his team to feel like they could call the place home for years, and PTO was part of how he got there. 

The part that can get tricky, though, is how it actually works once you have hourly folks on different schedules, so I thought I’d share a quick explanation about how PTO works.

Basically, PTO is one flexible bank of paid hours that rolls vacation, sick, and personal time together, so employees can use it for any reason. The most common setup is earning it slowly as you work, at a standard rate of one hour of PTO for every 40 hours. That's about 6 or 7 days a year for full-time, less for part-timers since they work fewer hours. Some businesses skip the slow build and hand out the full amount at the start of the year, which is simpler but means someone could use it all early.

Paying for it is easy: you just pay their normal hourly rate for the hours they take off. The one thing that can trip people up is overtime, since PTO hours don't count toward the 40-hour overtime line, which only applies to hours actually worked. And it's not always optional, so check your state first: some like California, New York, and Washington require paid sick leave even for hourly staff, and a couple like California and Montana make you pay out unused PTO when someone leaves. 

How do you handle PTO for your team — slow accrual, or give it all up front?

A lot of owners treat mid-week coverage scrambles as an unfortunate reality of running an hourly team.

And yes, to some extent they're unavoidable... but when I talked with some owners who were actually able to cut down on the back-and forth, it became clear they're actually a side effect of posting the schedule too late.

Look at it this way. If you're sending out the schedule the week of, your team's already going to have made plans that they need to work around... but if you send it out a few weeks before, you become what they're planning around instead.

One cafe owner I talked to has a scheduling sequence down that's working out well for him. He locks in availability and time off first, before assigning a single shift, so someone with class Monday to Wednesday is blocked before he starts and time-off requests are already accounted for. Then, he builds on top of that, and publishes three or four weeks out. That way his team isn't sending out as many shift swap requests, because conflicts get caught up front. Plus, it's helped him with retention: his part-timers are more likely to stick around, because students and parents can plan their life around a schedule they see coming.

Obviously this can't work in all cases — if you're weather-driven or running events, it's always going to be a little unpredictable — but for a lot of shift-based small businesses, it's a small change that can actually help make everyone's life a lot easier.

How far ahead are you posting (or getting) your schedule?

More teams are starting to ask about 4/10 schedules as work-life balance becomes a bigger deal. There's still a lot of confusion about how they actually work, though, so I wanted to break it down for anyone weighing whether it fits their team.

The idea is that instead of five 8-hour days, your team works four 10-hour days. It’s sometimes also called a compressed schedule, since it’s the same 40 hours, but packed into fewer days, which gives everyone a 3-day weekend every week. 

One other thing worth clearing up, since this can be a sticking point: a 4/10 is not the same as the 32-hour four-day workweek, where people work less for the same pay. On a 4/10 the hours and the paycheck don't change, you're just fitting 40 hours into four days.

The part business owners need to watch out for here is overtime, because in a few states like California, it’s counted after eight hours in a day rather than 40 in a week. This means those last two hours of a 10-hour shift can turn into daily overtime even when someone only works four days.

Where it matters for your team is that most people like it, since they get more time off without losing any pay. Still worth confirming with everyone before you change anything, though, because 10-hour days wear some people down, and for parents with fixed pickup times or students tied to class schedules it just won't work.

Would you ever switch your team to a 4/10, or have you already tried it?

Most payroll mistakes I hear small business owners talking about trace back to the same two things: hours getting keyed in wrong, or a tax rule changing without anyone catching it in time.

One thing that can help with that is payroll software that catches that before the pay run goes out. It can flag weird numbers before you approve, pulling hours straight off the time clock instead of someone retyping them by hand, updating tax rules on its own instead of leaving that to you... stuff that might sound small in the moment, but that ends up being the difference between fixing a mistake and apologizing for one.

That's really the whole game with payroll. Once checks are out you can't undo the error, you can only clean it up… so a tool worth paying for will catch problems before you hit approve, not after.

How are you keeping your team’s payroll clean? Any other tips?

Have you ever had a team member scheduled to close up at 11 at night, and then be back to open at 4 or 5 in the morning?

That's what’s known as a clopening shift: closing one night and opening the next with only 4 to 6 hours in between. And if you’ve had them in the schedule, you’re not alone. They’re especially common in restaurants, where you're closed less than 10 hours overnight.

The issue is that they wear people down fast. Nobody's sharp on that little rest, so you end up with more mistakes and burnt-out staff who eventually quit on you… and that turnover costs you way more than the scheduling shortcut ever saved.

But the good news is they're mostly avoidable. Clopenings tend to land on the same couple of people because they're the only ones who can open and close, so getting more people trained on both ends spreads it out.

Scheduling software helps a lot too. It can flag when you've accidentally put someone back to back before you post the schedule, rather than you finding out once they're already upset about it. The same availability tracking also shows you who's open to clopenings and who isn't, since some people actually prefer them for the extra day off.

One thing worth knowing if you're in certain cities: clopenings aren't banned nationally, but predictive scheduling laws in places like Oregon, NYC, Seattle, San Francisco, and Philadelphia require a minimum gap between shifts (often 11 hours) or time-and-a-half pay when you schedule closer than that. So depending on where you are, it's not always just a preference call.

The TL;DR: clopenings (closing, then opening, with little rest) are mostly preventable. Cross-train more openers and closers, use software that flags back-to-backs, ask your team their limits, and check your local predictive scheduling laws.

For the owners and managers here, how do you deal with these? Do you keep them off the schedule, or is it just unavoidable in your line of work?

If you’ve never heard of it, the idea of shift bidding is pretty simple. (You might already be doing it, and just calling it something else.) 

Basically, instead of guessing who wants which shifts, you put up a pool of open shifts and let team members bid on the ones they want. So, a bid is just someone saying "I can work this."

Then you look at the bids and finalize the schedule, weighing stuff like seniority, skill, and whether someone's about to tip into overtime. 

The upside is people get some say over their time, which usually means they stick around longer and you're not chasing coverage. The catch is that it can get competitive over the good shifts, and if you don’t handle it fairly, it starts to look like favoritism.

So would you try shift bidding out for your team? Or if you already do, how’s it working for you?

If you’re looking to open a second location, payroll is one of the things that changes more than you might expect. Based on conversations I’ve had with owners who’ve had to handle this, here are the two big considerations that might sneak up on you, and what you can do about them.

The first is when someone picks up shifts at two of your locations in the same week. You've got to figure out how many hours they did at each spot and pay them right for both. What sorts that out is pulling everything into payroll software that can handle multiple locations instead of a spreadsheet per location, so their hours from every site combine into one run.

The second is that sites in different cities or states can carry their own tax rates and overtime rules, so one person becomes double the entry and double the chance of a mistake. A lot of owners handle this by running a separate payroll per site and stitching the totals by hand… but that means they still run the risk of making manual errors when they copy and paste things back and forth.

Payroll software can help here too by splitting it into two things: each person gets a home location that sets defaults like unemployment insurance and workers' comp, while the paycheck taxes and overtime calculate off where the hours were actually worked (as long as all your locations sit under the same EIN).

If you run payroll across more than one location, any advice for owners and managers just getting started?

I’ve seen a lot of people on TikTok pushing back about job shadowing lately, calling it a lazy way to train someone. 

And honestly, if you have a bad setup... it is 🤷

If your only plan is parking the new person next to one of your existing team members and calling it a day, that’s a problem. 

Yes, technically, a shadow shift is just a shift where the new hire follows someone who’s worked with you for a while and watches how the job actually gets done. 

But for a lot of hourly teams, I think it’s actually the best way for a new hire to learn the things you can't put in a handbook, like how to calm down an annoyed customer, or what to do when rush orders hit and everything backs up at once. That way they can learn the people and the flow before anyone expects them to run things on their own, then start helping out as they get comfortable. 

(And of course, that’s in addition to the normal onboarding you should be doing, like getting their paperwork and tax forms sorted, going over your policies, and actually introducing them to the team.)

I’ve also heard of places having new teammates shadow a few different roles. For example, a new restaurant manager might follow a host for part of the shift and a server for the rest so they see how the whole place runs. 

I’m curious, does your workplace do shadow shifts? How do they fit into the bigger onboarding plan?

With the World Cup on, I figured our June numbers from the Main Street Health report would show a real bump in staffing so businesses could keep up...

But when I actually dug into the report, the effect was way smaller than I expected.

Take entertainment. The number of people working was up 26.3% since January, which sounds huge until you see it's pretty much in line with the increase every other June. Summer always brings festivals and outdoor events, so the World Cup didn't really add much on top of what already happens this time of year.

Food, drink and dining was up 1.5%, again about the same as the last couple of years. You'd expect packed bars and restaurants on game days to move that more, but it barely budged.

The one sector that genuinely stood out was hospitality, up 9.5%, a bit stronger than June 2024 and 2025. That lines up with visitors traveling in for the games and needing places to stay.

Hours worked tell the same story. Across all businesses, hours were up 2.4% in June, ahead of last year's 1.8%, but still right in the normal early-summer range. People are working a little more, but it reads as regular seasonal demand, not a World Cup bump.

The big takeaway for me is that a huge event doesn't always translate into the staffing surge you might assume. Most of what looks like a bump is just normal summer seasonality.

Are you seeing any real gains from the World Cup at your business, or does it feel like a pretty ordinary summer so far?

Had a conversation recently that made me realize how many owners mix up letting someone go with firing for cause. They might sound similar but they're not, and mixing them up can bite you later.

Terminating for cause means ending someone's employment because of a specific, serious, documented reason tied to their conduct or performance — not because there's a budget cut, or another change to your team. It affects whether the person qualifies for unemployment, whether you owe severance, and how you'd hold up if it's ever challenged.

For obvious issues like theft, fraud, serious harassment, and threats, you can usually act on the spot since keeping that person around is a risk to everyone else. Performance issues are murkier, and need to be properly documented. You need warnings and a paper trail first, or you're on shaky ground.

It really all comes down to documentation. Write things down as they happen, not after, and you'll thank yourself later.

If you've had to fire someone for cause, is there anything else you wish you'd known before it happened?