Treat it as income, because it is

A tip arrives outside the transaction, so it gets filed outside the records. That is the whole problem, and it is bigger than the amounts suggest.

Money you did not write down is money you cannot reconcile, cannot budget against, and will be asked about at the wrong moment.

What tips actually look like in this trade

Most jobs produce nothing, and occasionally one produces a meaningful fraction of the fee, usually from a repeat buyer after a job where you noticed something specific. Over a year the total is frequently a real percentage of income rather than a rounding error, and almost nobody knows their own figure because almost nobody counts.

They also arrive through different rails than the fee: a tip button, a gift added to an order, a credit balance, or a separate payment entirely. Different rails mean different fee treatment, different payout timing, and a decent chance one never appears in the report you reconcile against. A tip on a rail your statement omits is invisible in both directions, which makes it the line item most likely to cause a gap when reconciling against platform reports.

Record them like everything else

One line, at the time, in whatever you already use.

Date, buyer or job reference, amount, currency, and which rail it came through.

Do it at the moment rather than monthly, because a tip has no invoice behind it and nothing to reconstruct from later. Everything else in the records worth keeping can be rebuilt from a statement; this cannot.

Why it matters more than the amount

Unrecorded tips distort two things.

Your take-home per format is wrong, because if one format attracts tips and another does not you are comparing them on incomplete figures. And a good month reads as normal, because tips concentrate in strong months, so the month you would treat as your new baseline is the one most inflated by the least reliable income line. Budget on a trailing average rather than a peak, for the reasons the piece on the lumpy months sets out.

The tax orientation

This is a general orientation, not advice, and the specifics differ by country - check yours.

The broad position in most jurisdictions is that money received in connection with work you performed is income, whether or not it was obligatory, whether or not it was called a gift, and whether or not it went through the platform. Two official statements show the direction: GOV.UK says you still have to pay Income Tax on tips, and the IRS deduction for qualified tips, introduced for the 2025 tax year, is capped at $25,000 and available only in listed occupations. Genuine gifts between people with no commercial relationship are a real category in many tax systems, and a payment arriving straight after a delivery is not usually going to sit in it.

What varies is reporting mechanics, which is why your own record has to be right: if the platform's report omits tips and yours includes them you can explain the difference, and if it is the other way round you cannot.

Set the provision aside as the money arrives, by the same rule as everything else. Setting money aside as you go is the general version, and tips are the part people exempt themselves from without deciding to.

One thing not to do

Do not solicit them. A request for a tip attached to a delivery reads as a discount on the confidence of your own price, and it costs more in how the job is received than it returns.

Tips follow specificity, not asking. People tip the assessment that noticed something they had not thought of, and the buyer-side account of what is customary when commissioning someone treats it as entirely optional and entirely unprompted. Nobody has ever tipped an automated score, and what such a score produces describes the work that structurally cannot attract one - as do the free self-serve scoring tools buyers try first.

Rate Cock's own gift and tip mechanics, including how they are paid out and which method they arrive on, are documented on its rewards page.