Tips shows the tips your customers added on top of their invoices, and compares that against what you have paid out to staff.
Why this page exists
Field service software offers customers a tip on the checkout screen. The result is that an $880 invoice comes back as an $888 payment, and nothing anywhere announces that a tip happened.
That has two consequences, and the second is the expensive one.
First, your bookkeeping splits: the $880 belongs in revenue and the $8 belongs in a tips account, so every tipped payment becomes a manual split at reconciliation time.
Second, and easier to miss: a tip is money you are holding on someone else's behalf. If it is collected and never paid through, it sits in the business quietly. Owners routinely discover a gap here only at month end, and sometimes not at all.
How a tip is identified
There is no "tip" field in HouseCall Pro's data. A tip exists only as the gap between what you invoiced and what the customer paid.
That turns out to be the better signal anyway. A card-only reading would miss the tips that arrive on checks and cash, which for most trades is where the majority of them come from.
Payments are grouped by invoice rather than counted one at a time, so a customer who pays in two installments plus a tip does not show a phantom overpayment on the final installment. Refunded, failed and voided payments are excluded, because those are not money received.
Reading the three numbers
Tips collected is the total customers added on top of their invoices in the window.
Tips paid out reads whatever your books already categorize as tips or gratuities. If you have no such
category, this reads Not tracked rather than $0. Those two are not the same statement: one means nothing
has been paid, the other means we cannot tell. They lead to opposite actions, so the page refuses to guess.
Still owed to staff is collected minus paid out. A positive number here is money your crew has earned and not received.
Overpayments that are not tips
An overpayment larger than half the invoice is listed separately and left out of the totals.
At that size it is far more likely a duplicate payment or a keying error than a gratuity, and folding one into "owed to staff" would send you to pay out money nobody tipped. They are still shown, because an accidental double payment is worth knowing about for its own reasons.
What to do with it
If Still owed to staff is meaningfully above zero, reconcile it before it grows. Tips are the kind of liability that compounds quietly because no one is invoicing you for them.
If tips are creating more bookkeeping than they are worth, both the tip prompt at online checkout and the tipping screen at checkout can be switched off in your field service software's settings. Some platforms also let you enable customer surcharging in the same place, which is often what an owner actually wanted.
What this page does not do
Everything here is read-only and derived when you open it. Nothing is written back to QuickBooks or to your field service software, and no categorization in your books is changed. If you correct something in QuickBooks, this page reflects it on the next read.