Cafe payroll: part-timers, card tips, and the student wage

The part-time roster is the payroll, not a footnote

A cafe covers seventy-plus open hours a week with a bench of ten or twelve part-timers, so the schedule and the pay run are the same document wearing two hats. We wire them together: shifts built in 7shifts, Square Shifts, or Homebase, actual clock-ins flowing into Wagepoint or QuickBooks Online Payroll, no rekeying in between. Two Ontario rules do most of the damage when this is improvised. The three-hour rule means a barista who regularly works longer shifts and gets cut after a dead ninety minutes is still owed three hours. And for a variable-hours crew, paying vacation pay at 4 per cent on every cheque — with the written agreement the ESA expects — beats accruing balances you will only reconcile at exit.

Public-holiday pay looks intimidating for part-timers and is actually self-correcting: regular wages from the four work weeks before the holiday week, divided by twenty. A Saturday-only barista prorates automatically. No side spreadsheet required.

Card tips made you the middleman — decide which kind

In a counter-service shop most tips now arrive through the terminal prompt, so the money lands in your bank account before any barista sees it. What you do next sets the CRA treatment. Pass the money through promptly, untouched, under a split the staff themselves decided, and CRA still treats it as direct tips — no CPP, no EI, nothing on the T4; each employee reports the income on their own return. Set the formula yourself, hold the money until payday, or route a share to people the customer never saw, and you have controlled tips: wages, with CPP, EI, and tax withheld through the pay run and the amounts sitting on the T4.

Ontario layers its own rules on top: tips belong to the staff, deductions from them are barred outside a proper pool, and an owner may only take a share while regularly doing the same work to a substantial degree. An owner pulling shots five mornings a week can qualify; one who only does the banking cannot. Pick a policy, write it down, and run it identically every pay period — drifting between direct and controlled mid-year is the expensive option.

Students, the second minimum wage, and the CPP birthday rule

The student minimum wage is narrower than the label suggests: it applies only to workers under 18 who put in 28 hours a week or less while school is in session, or who work during a school break. The 18-year-old you promoted to shift lead earns the general rate on any hours, and so does a 17-year-old the week she works 32 hours mid-semester. Both rates are indexed every October 1 — as of October 2025 they sit at $16.60 and $17.60 — so recheck the file before the winter schedule goes out.

Two federal wrinkles ride along with a young crew. CPP contributions start the month after an employee turns 18, a mid-year flip your payroll software only catches if the birthdate is actually in the file. EI has no age floor — it applies from the first insurable hour. And when the September exodus hits, each departing student needs an ROE through ROE Web within five days, because their EI history follows them whether or not they ever claim.

The fixed spine behind the machine

Underneath the roster sits a short, unglamorous checklist: a payroll account on your business number, remittances by the 15th of the following month, T4s by the end of February, WSIB registration for food-service work, and the Employer Health Tax exemption on the first $1 million of Ontario payroll — which keeps most single-location cafes out of EHT entirely. We run it on a fixed fee so a fifteen-person roster costs the same boring amount every month. Labour belongs beside sales in your weekly numbers, and that reporting lives in our cafe bookkeeping. If you pay royalties to a US concept or are eyeing one, the withholding questions sit outside payroll — our cross-border guide for cafes covers that side.

Source: CRA — Tips and gratuities.