About Old Bag of Nails

Celebrating its 30th anniversary this year, the "Irish pub with British grub" chain has grown to 16 locations across Ohio and Michigan and other hospitality concepts, including Hobnob Pizza, a diner called Chef-O-Nette, and formerly the Union Cafe and Axis Nightclub evening venues in downtown Columbus.

VP of Finance Chelsey Klube, who handles payroll, accounting, and analytics, shares how the beloved hospitality group transitioned their same-day payments of tips from paper checks and cash to digital. 

The challenge: daily tip checks were "an absolute disaster"

Before Branch, paying out tips was one of the most time-consuming parts of the week.

At the Union and Axis venues, the team was writing paper checks every single day to pay out tips to every tipped employee: sometimes 10 to 12 bartenders at the nightclub and 20 or more servers and bartenders at the restaurant. "It was so much time figuring out tip payouts and who had picked up their checks," Chelsey said. "Some were not cashing the checks, so we had to make sure they hadn't cleared, and we were reissuing them and paying for stop payments. It was just absolute chaos."

The company moved those venues to a digital tip provider that charged fees per location, which initially helped, but as the business continued to add locations, the cost became hard to justify. "It was going to cost a lot of money to move everybody on," Chelsey said. "Those conversations pretty immediately stopped."

Meanwhile, the Old Bag of Nails locations were still doing cash payouts at the end of each night, which meant bank runs, replenishing petty cash, and liability from cash sitting in the building.

Why Branch

After a marketing email put Branch on their radar, Chelsey booked a discovery call and didn't feel the need to shop around. "Branch was capable of doing everything we were looking for, and the money side of it made sense for us and for our employees." 

The goals were clear: reduce the liability of cash on hand, get real transparency into where tip money was going, and free up time across the business. All without pushing longtime staff onto a bi-weekly pay cycle that could disrupt how they manage their money.

The solution: from days-long check runs to a morning routine

Switching to Branch was quick. "It only took a couple days between deciding to do it and being up," Chelsey said.

Today, most locations send tips the next morning as part of the opening checklist. "It takes them minutes to sit down and just send everything," she said, a sharp contrast to servers and managers stepping off the floor mid-shift to sort out cash for credit card tips.

Onboarding new locations and new hires has only gotten easier since Branch rolled out its updated self-service experience. For new hires, sending an invite now takes managers just seconds.

The self-service flow also took pressure off the moment of hire. "It's a lot less pressure than being a new hire sitting in a busy restaurant with a manager you just met and having to set up everything on-site,'" Chelsey said. "Now they set it up from home. We've alleviated that."

The results

Hours reclaimed every quarter. No more writing, distributing, tracking, or reissuing paper checks. Chelsey estimates the switch saves roughly three to four hours per week for management and payroll—time that used to go to opening the safe, digging out checks, and getting them initiated.

Hundreds of dollars saved per quarter. Between boxes of checks, stop payments, and the labor behind them, the paper check process was costing an estimated few hundred dollars a quarter, with roughly $200 to $300 of that in paper check costs alone.

Less cash liability. Moving away from end-of-night cash payouts cut down on bank runs and petty cash sitting in the building.

True financial transparency. Because what the team sends through Branch mirrors the prior day's credit card tips, discrepancies are easy to catch. "I emailed a store today and said, 'You guys sent out $50 less than your credit card tips. What's going on?'" Chelsey said. The answer was a staff member who hadn't signed up yet. "Versus having it be on a post-it in an office or scribbled in a safe log. We really know the money is going where it needs to go."

The employee experience: digital tips every day, without the trade-offs

A big part of the decision was protecting the employee experience, especially for long-tenured staff. Rather than shift people to bi-weekly payroll, Branch let the company keep tips flowing every day, digitally.

Employees choose how they get their money based on what works for them: an instant transfer, Apple Wallet, or a standard transfer with no transfer fee. "It meets everybody wherever they're at in their financial needs and habits," Chelsey said.

A growing number of employees are also using Branch Direct for direct deposit, and the company is now steering stores toward it in place of the traditional pay cards they used before.

Same-day tips have even become a recruiting and scheduling perk. "We've had a couple instances where people say, 'I'll send you your tips tonight instead of tomorrow if you can come cover today,'" Chelsey said.

That advantage stands out locally. "In Columbus, a lot of restaurants are just doing credit card tips on paychecks," Chelsey said, describing how a friend's bar switched to tips every two weeks with little notice. "It was really disruptive to a lot of their staff. This helps us stay competitive." As she put it, daily access also matches how many hospitality workers actually budget: "A lot of people know how to manage a couple hundred a day. They don't know how to manage $1,000 or more every two weeks and make that stretch."

Staff and support feedback

The rollout won over even the toughest crowd. One of the first Old Bag of Nails locations on Branch has many longtime employees and managers, "the tipping point," as Chelsey put it. "I've not had any negative feedback reach me."

Managers have come around too. "We get a lot of feedback from managers saying, 'It's not as hard as I thought. It's not that scary,'" she said. "Once you know what you're doing, it's really fast. All of the things we were hoping for is the feedback we've been getting."

The Branch team gets a shout-out as well. "The team has been great and so helpful," the customer said. "They’re super friendly and very responsive. I cannot say enough good things about them—they’ve made this very easy."

Looking ahead

When the company opened a new restaurant, Chef-O-Nette, it launched on Branch from day one. "There was no transition period. It was just how it is," Chelsey said. After a stretch of rapid growth, the team is taking a breath, but with Branch in place, they're set up to scale the next wave of locations without missing a beat.