TL;DR: A Toast Shift Review is your nightly earnings statement. Credit Tips are tips left on cards. Cash Sales is cash you collected. Owed to Restaurant is cash sales minus card tips — positive means you pay the house, negative means the house pays you. What it usually does not show is the tip-out you paid or the cash tips you never declared, which is exactly why your own record matters.
Where the Shift Review comes from
Toast walks you through a fixed close-out sequence at the end of a shift:
- Close checks — every open tab has to be settled
- Declare tips — a keypad appears and asks what you took in cash
- Reconcile — Toast totals what you sold against what you're holding
- Clock out — the Shift Review prints or appears on screen
The Shift Review is the output of step 3. Toast documents the report in its Shift Review overview.
The important thing about that sequence: step 2 is the only place cash enters the system. Toast watches every card transaction automatically, so card tips are exact. Cash tips are whatever you typed on that keypad.
Line by line
Credit Tips
Tips left on credit and debit cards during your shift. This number is machine-exact — it came from the card processor, not from anyone's memory.
The restaurant is holding this money. Depending on house policy it comes back to you as cash at the end of the night, or it rides along to your next paycheck.
Cash Sales
The total of checks that were settled with cash. This is not your money — it's the restaurant's revenue that happens to be sitting in your apron.
Cash Tips (Declared)
What you told the keypad. Toast passes this figure to payroll, so it becomes part of your reported income.
Two things worth being clear about:
- All tips are taxable whether or not they went through the keypad. IRS Publication 531 asks for a daily record of cash tips actually received.
- Under-declaring shrinks your reported income, which affects mortgage and loan applications, Social Security earnings credit, and — from 2025 through 2028 — how much of the federal tip deduction you can actually claim. The deduction only applies to tips you report.
Owed to Restaurant
The line people misread most. It is, roughly:
Cash Sales − Credit Tips owed to you = Owed to Restaurant
A positive number is cash you hand over. A negative number means the restaurant owes you — your card tips exceeded the cash in your apron, so you walk out with money instead of dropping it.
Guests / Check count
How many checks and covers you handled. Not money, but the number that turns a good night into a number you can compare: tips per cover is the cleanest measure of whether a section is worth taking.
A worked example
Here are the actual figures from a Toast Shift Review:
| Line | Amount |
|---|---|
| Cash Sales | $14.39 |
| Non-Cash (Credit) Tips | $5.00 |
| Cash Tips Declared | $0.00 |
| Guests | 3 |
| Owed to Restaurant | $9.39 |
Read it: you collected $14.39 in cash, the house owes you $5.00 in card tips, so you hand back $14.39 − $5.00 = $9.39 and keep the five.
Notice what that slip does not tell you. It doesn't say what you actually earned per hour. It doesn't record a tip-out. And Cash Tips Declared: $0.00 almost certainly does not mean nobody left cash on a table that night — it means nothing was typed on the keypad.
What the Shift Review leaves out
Your tip-out. If you paid the bar and the bussers out of pocket, that money left your pocket after this slip was printed. It rarely appears here, and it almost never appears on a pay stub. If you tip out 3% of sales, that comes straight off your real hourly and nothing in the system is tracking it for you. (Our tip-out calculator does the arithmetic.)
Your hours. The slip has money but not time, so it can't tell you your real hourly wage — base pay plus tips minus tip-out, divided by hours actually worked. That's the number that tells you whether a Tuesday double was worth it.
Anything from last week. A Shift Review is a single night. Toast keeps your history for the restaurant's purposes, not yours — and if you change jobs, that history stops being reachable.
Keep your own copy
The practical habit: photograph the slip before you hand it in or throw it out. It takes three seconds and it's the only version of that night's numbers you'll still have in April.
That's the whole reason TipScan exists — snap the slip and the Credit Tips, Cash Sales and Owed lines get read off it automatically, with your tip-out and hours added so you get a real hourly instead of a pile of receipts.
Related
- How to read your server checkout slip — the same walkthrough across Toast, Aloha and Micros
- Aloha Server Checkout, explained
- Micros Employee Tip Report, explained
- How to keep a tip log for taxes
- Do I have to claim cash tips? — the declaring question, answered