TL;DR: On an NCR Aloha Server Checkout, SALES is what you rang in, GROSS is what came in on top of it, LESS CHARGE TIPS subtracts the card tips the house owes you, and CASH OWED is what you hand over before you leave. The catch with Aloha specifically: your restaurant may have redesigned the whole slip, so labels and layout vary far more than on other systems.
Aloha's defining quirk: your slip is custom
Most POS systems print a broadly consistent report. Aloha does not, by design.
NCR ships a standard checkout report, and it also ships a Custom Checkout Report — documented in NCR's Aloha documentation — that lets a restaurant define its own layout, its own line ordering, and its own labels. Which sections print, and what they're called, was decided by whoever configured your store's system, possibly years before you were hired.
This matters practically: if you've worked at two Aloha restaurants and thought you were losing your mind trying to find the same number twice, you weren't. The underlying data is the same. The presentation is not.
The lines below are the ones that survive across almost every variant.
Line by line
SALES
The menu value of everything you rang in during the shift — food, drink, and whatever categories your store breaks out.
This is the basis for a sales-based tip-out. If your house takes 3% of sales for support staff, this is the number it's 3% of, which is why sales-based tip-outs hurt so much on a slow, low-tipping night: you pay on what you sold, not on what you were tipped.
GROSS / GROSS RECEIPTS
Everything that actually came in through your checks. It's larger than SALES because it adds what customers paid on top of the menu price — charge tips, and depending on configuration, tax and service charges.
GROSS is the figure the house reconciles against, so it's the starting point for what you owe.
LESS CHARGE TIPS
Aloha's name for tips left on cards. "Non-Cash Tips" is the other common label.
It appears as a subtraction because these tips are money the restaurant collected on your behalf and now has to give back. It comes off what you owe.
CASH OWED
What you hand the house. Roughly:
GROSS − CHARGE TIPS (− automated tip-outs, if your store handles them here) = CASH OWED
There's usually a signature line under it, because this is the number the manager and the server are agreeing on.
Tip declaration
Aloha prompts for declared cash tips during the checkout flow — NCR's FOH Cashier Guide documents the sequence. As on every POS, the system knows your card tips exactly and knows about your cash tips only if you tell it.
A worked example
Real figures from an Aloha checkout report:
| Line | Amount |
|---|---|
| SALES | $47.25 |
| GROSS | $54.81 |
| LESS CHARGE TIPS | $0.00 |
| CASH OWED | $54.81 |
Read it: you rang in $47.25 of food and drink; with tax and everything else on top, $54.81 actually came through your checks; no card tips were left, so nothing gets subtracted, and the full $54.81 goes to the house.
That $0.00 charge-tips line is what makes this an all-cash shift. Every tip that night — if there were any — was cash on the table, which means the only trace of it is whatever you declared and whatever you wrote down yourself.
The gap between SALES and your real hourly
An Aloha checkout is very good at answering "what does the server owe the restaurant." It's not built to answer "what did the server make."
Missing from it:
- Hours worked. No time, so no hourly.
- Tip-outs paid by hand. If you tip the bar directly out of your pocket, no line here knows about it.
- Undeclared cash. By definition.
Sales-based tip-outs make this worse, because the amount you owe support staff is pinned to SALES — a number that keeps climbing whether or not the tips did. On a night with big checks and bad tippers, you can pay more tip-out and take home less. Our tip-out calculator shows what a percentage-of-sales structure actually costs you on a given night.
Keep the slip
Given how much your restaurant may have customized the printout, your slip is the only authoritative record of your own shift in the exact format your restaurant uses. Photograph it before you hand it in.
TipScan reads Aloha checkouts — including customized layouts — and pulls SALES, CHARGE TIPS and CASH OWED off the photo, then adds your hours and tip-out to give you the number the slip never prints: what you actually made per hour.