Should Your Payment Screen Suggest a Tip?
Your terminal can offer 15%, 18% or 20% before your client approves the total. Most salons switch it on because the option is there, not because they chose it. Is it actually worth it?
Do tip prompts really raise tips?
Probably, yes. Give someone three choices and they almost always pick one of the three, and the lowest one becomes a floor. A client who used to round up to whatever felt right now leaves a percentage instead.
That is the terminal vendors’ pitch, and it is not wrong. It is also the only thing they measure. The real question is not whether the number goes up, but what you pay for that.
The hidden cost: the best moment of the visit
Payment and rebooking are fighting over the same thirty seconds at the counter. They are the only ones where your client is still in front of you, happy with her hair, and has not reached for her coat yet.
Spend those seconds making her settle on a percentage and they are spent.
💡 What I observe with our clients: salons that book the next appointment before bringing out the terminal find rebooking noticeably easier than salons that take payment first. A client who has just had to decide on a percentage tenses up when you bring up her next date.
Coffee shop tiers are not your tiers
18%, 20% and 25% are coffee counter numbers, sitting on a six dollar bill. Copy them onto a two hundred dollar colour service and you are asking your client for something of an entirely different order, and she can see it.
That is why 15%, 18% and 20% hold up better in a salon. The top tier stays an amount a regular can give without thinking twice about it.
⚠️ The mistake to avoid: setting your tiers once and never looking at them again. A percentage that sat comfortably on your prices three years ago does not sit the same way on today’s prices.
What the terminal changes on your payroll
Here is the part I rarely see understood. A tip handed over in cash is none of your business. It belongs to the person who received it, she reports it herself on her own return, and you have nothing to withhold and nothing to put on her T4.
A tip left on your terminal does not take the same route. It lands in your bank account before it reaches your employee, and in 2022 the Federal Court of Appeal held that this makes it money paid by the employer. In other words it counts as pay, with the source deductions and the T4 that come with it, even if you hand it over the same evening.
Two Quebec rules sit on top of that: the tip belongs to the person who provided the service, and you cannot make her cover the card processing fees on her own share.
Order matters more than the choice
Having looked at both ways of doing it, my finding is that the real decision is not whether to show the prompts. It is what comes first at the counter.
Book the next appointment, then bring out the terminal. You can show whatever tiers you like after that, because the one thing the tip could have cost you is already safe in the calendar. It costs nothing to change, and it is the only part of this that is entirely yours to control.
The comparison at a glance
| Criteria | With prompts | Without prompts |
|---|---|---|
| Amount left | Higher | Variable |
| Client comfort | Depends on the tiers | No pressure |
| Rebooking | Do it before payment | Less competition |
| Tip to run through payroll | Yes, as soon as it goes through the terminal | Yes, as soon as it goes through the terminal |
| Upkeep | Revisit at every price increase | Nothing to set |
| Recommendation | Show 15%, 18% and 20%, but always after rebooking | |
Conclusion
Tip prompts are neither a trap nor free money. They are a question of order: whatever you ask your client for first is what you are most likely to get.
At Flowcut, invoicing happens automatically on every service and payment tracking is live, which prepares payroll without re-entering anything. And because your clients can rebook online or from their portal, the next appointment no longer depends on thirty seconds at the counter.
