Case study 03
Palapa Tours Ottawa
Floating tiki-bar cruises with a small crew and a different set of staff on every sailing. The problem was never revenue. It was the tip-out, and it was argued over after the boat came in.
Shipped Ottawa Custom software
The business
A bar that floats, with a new crew on every sailing.
Palapa Tours runs floating tiki-bar cruises in Ottawa. Each sailing is its own shift: guests board, the bar serves, the deck works the room, the boat comes back, and the crew is paid out before everyone goes home.
Cash and card sit side by side, and the roster is not the same twice. That is a normal way to run a small hospitality operation. It is also the exact condition under which a hand-worked tip-out starts to drift.
What made it awkward
A short, intense shift, a mixed payment mix, and a roster that changes cruise to cruise. Nothing about that is unusual. All of it makes a manual split harder to repeat.
Why it mattered
Tip-out is take-home pay. When the number moves and nobody can say why, the argument is not about arithmetic any more. It is about trust between the people on the boat.
Shipped and closed: custom tip-out software for Palapa Tours Ottawa.
-
Palapa Tours Ottawa
The problem
A split that changes depending on who does the arithmetic is a split nobody trusts.
Gratuity splits shifted cruise to cruise and were hard to reconcile fairly. The rules existed in someone's head, the totals were worked out after a long shift, and the result was disputes among staff over what each person was owed.
-
01
The split moved between sailings
Different crew, different mix of roles, different judgement calls. The same shift on two nights could produce two different shapes of payout.
-
02
Reconciling it fairly was hard work
Totalling gratuities across cash and card, then dividing them by role, was manual arithmetic done at the end of a shift by someone who wanted to go home.
-
03
There was no record to point at
Without a stored calculation per cruise, a question about last weekend could not be answered. It could only be re-argued.
-
04
So the crew argued about pay
That was the real cost. Not a line on a P&L, but disputes among staff on a small team where everyone works the same deck next weekend.
The fix was not a bigger spreadsheet. It was making the rule the only thing that decides the number.
Exodus Consulting, on the Palapa Tours build
What we built
Custom tip-out software that calculates, splits and tracks the gratuities.
We built a small piece of software that does one job properly. The cruise closes, the gratuity pool is totalled, the split rules the operator set are applied, and every staff member's payout is written down and kept.
The rules are set once instead of being re-decided at the end of each sailing. The arithmetic runs the same way every time, so the number is the same number no matter who is looking at it. Nobody has to remember what was agreed last month.
The engagement is closed. The software shipped, it is in Palapa's hands, and they own it.
- Calculates
- Totals the gratuity pool for the sailing once the cruise closes.
- Splits
- Applies the operator's own split rules by role, set once rather than argued per shift.
- Tracks
- Records the payout per staff member per cruise, so a question about a past sailing has an answer.
- Ownership
- Custom build, delivered to the client. They own the code.
How the split runs
We have no capture of this surface to show, so the plate below is drawn, not photographed. It shows the shape of the calculation. The role names and the percentages are placeholders standing in for whatever rules an operator sets, not Palapa's figures.
| Role on the sailing | Share of pool | Recorded |
|---|---|---|
| Bar | 40% | Logged per cruise |
| Deck and service | 35% | Logged per cruise |
| Captain and helm | 15% | Logged per cruise |
| Dock and turnaround | 10% | Logged per cruise |
INTERFACE DIAGRAM, not a screenshot. It illustrates the calculation the shipped software performs. The role names and the percentages are placeholders, not Palapa's figures.
The outcome
Consistent payouts, a visible rule, and the disputes gone.
This is what the engagement delivered, stated at exactly its size. Payouts came out consistent because the same rules ran on every cruise, the calculation was recorded rather than remembered, and the arguments about the tip-out stopped. We do not have a revenue figure or a percentage from Palapa, so we are not printing one.
Consistent
ShippedOne set of split rules, applied the same way on every sailing. The payout stopped depending on who worked it out or how late it was.
Transparent
ShippedEvery cruise leaves a tracked payout per staff member. A crew member asking why their number looks like that can be shown the calculation instead of an opinion.
Disputes removed
ShippedThe reason the disputes existed was variance. With the variance gone, the argument had nothing left to be about.
What we are not claiming
No dollar figure, no percentage, no hours-saved number. Palapa did not give us one and we will not invent one. The result here is a process that is consistent and a payout that is trusted.
What happens next
Small builds count. This one was one file of arithmetic done properly.
If something in your operation produces a different answer depending on who works it out, that is the same problem in a different room. The free audit maps where it leaks and prints the arithmetic before you commit to anything.
We agree the baseline in writing before anything is built, the clock starts at deployment rather than signature, and you own the code. The bar and the timeframe are agreed per engagement. Nothing here guarantees a particular dollar amount.
- Who you talk to
- Shiv and Vishal. No account managers, no slide decks.
- Direct
- shiv@exdsconsulting.com
- Read next
- What we build, then the rest of our work.