PJSTips: Overview and User Guide

PJSTips is a personal shift and earnings tracker that helps you see how much you work, how much you earn in tips, and how your hourly pay and tips add up. Each account has its own PJSTips journal, profile settings, and reports. You can record shifts, correct past entries, compare earnings across different periods, estimate biweekly earnings, import shift entries from a CSV file, and export your records to a spreadsheet. Choose from 12 color themes to personalize your account.

PJSTips is actively being developed. More features and improvements are still in development.

Try the populated sample account

Open PJSTips and enter:

• Email: sample@philipjsimmons.com
• Password: sample

The live sample account contains 1,777 fictional shifts from January 1, 2020, through October 22, 2026. Complete Monday–Sunday weeks average 37 hours, with weekly totals varying from 30 to 44 hours. Tips also vary. This lets you explore reports with several years of information already populated.

The sample account is live and ready to explore. It is an editable account, so changes made while signed in affect its shared example records. Use your own account for personal information.

Suggested first look: Log in, select All time, review the yearly totals, and select a year’s chart bar to explore that year in more detail.

1. Sign in or create your own account

1. Open PJSTips using the link above.
2. Enter your email address and password, then select Log in.
3. To register, select Create account on the sign-in screen.
4. Enter your name, email address, and a password of at least 12 characters. Confirm your password and optionally choose a profile photo.
5. Select Create my account.

A new personal account starts with its own empty PJSTips journal. The sample password is a special imported example; new registrations require at least 12 characters.

2. Set up your profile and pay information

1. Select your name or avatar at the top of the page, or select the PJSTips logo, to open Your profile.
2. Update your display name if needed. Your email is displayed but cannot be changed through this form.
3. Choose a Color theme. There are 12 options: PJSTips, Ocean, Forest, Plum, Rose, Slate, plus six new themes: Sunset, Midnight, Emerald, Lavender, Sandstone, and Cherry.
4. Optionally upload a profile photo: JPEG, PNG, or WebP, under 2 MB and no larger than 3000 × 3000 pixels.
5. Under Pay & pay periods, enter your regular Hourly wage ($). For an $8 hourly rate, enter 8.00.
6. Set Pay-period Monday to the first Monday of a known two-week pay period. This establishes which weeks belong together.
7. Review the payday setting: Following Wednesday · +10 days after the pay period ends.
8. Select Save profile.

Set your wage before relying on earnings estimates. The overview currently falls back to $8/hour when a positive saved wage is missing; the biweekly estimate requires both a wage and a pay-period Monday. The sample profile uses $8/hour and January 6, 2020, as an example pay-period Monday.

3. Log a shift

1. Select Log a shift from the main button or navigation menu.
2. Check the automatically captured shift date. New entries use the current date supplied by the application.
3. Choose Shift start and Shift end. The time lists use 15-minute intervals.
4. Enter Tips collected ($). Enter zero for a shift with no tips.
5. Add optional notes, such as a busy service, special event, or anything you want to remember.
6. Review the calculated hours worked and tips per hour.
7. Select Save shift.

For an overnight shift, select an end time earlier than the start time. For example, 4:00 PM–1:00 AM is treated as a nine-hour shift ending the next day. Start and end times must be different.

Enter tips in the tips field; hourly wages are calculated separately from your pay settings. There is no separate unpaid-break field, so hours are calculated from the entered start and end times.

4. Edit a shift or enter a past date

1. Select Shift entries.
2. Choose a date range that includes the shift you want to change.
3. Find the entry and select Edit shift.
4. Adjust its date, start time, end time, tips, or notes.
5. Select Save changes. The reports recalculate automatically.

To add a historical shift, first create and save a new entry, then open that entry with Edit shift and change Shift date to the correct past date. If it disappears from your current report after saving, select All time or a date range containing its new date.

You can also reach an entry from the overview by selecting Edit day, then Edit shift. The current interface provides editing but no delete-shift button.

5. Understand the overview

Select Overview to see the earnings dashboard. Its summary cards reflect the selected report dates.

For example, 37 hours at $8/hour produces $296 in hourly wages. If tips total $500, entire wages are $796 before tax, or approximately $21.51 per hour. Tips alone average approximately $13.51 per hour.

Averages use total earnings divided by total hours, rather than averaging each shift’s hourly rate equally. Changing your saved hourly wage recalculates estimates for historical shifts too; the current app does not store a separate wage rate for each shift.

6. Choose report dates and compare periods

1. Select This week, This month, This year, or All time.
2. For a custom range, enter the start and end dates beside those buttons, then select Apply.
3. In the overview’s shift breakdown, choose Daily, Weekly, Monthly, or Yearly from the grouping menu.
4. Compare the hours, tips, entire wages, and hourly averages shown for each group.

Weeks run Monday through Sunday. PJSTips journal reports group entries by the date each shift started. Shift entries also respects the selected date range, so use All time when you want to see every saved entry.

7. Explore the tips chart

1. Open Overview and choose your date range and grouping.
2. Review Tips over time. Each bar shows tips for a day, week, month, or year, depending on the grouping.
3. Select a bar to explore that period. Yearly groups open monthly detail, monthly groups open weekly detail, and weekly groups open daily detail.
4. Select a day to view its individual shifts.
5. Use Back to previous report to return to the previous view.

The chart displays tips; use the summary cards and table to compare tips plus hourly wages.

8. Review biweekly earnings and payday

1. Set your hourly wage and pay-period Monday in Your profile.
2. Find Your biweekly paycheck on the main page.
3. Review the displayed two-week date range and Pay date.
4. Use the left and right arrows to move backward or forward one pay period at a time.
5. Review regular hours, overtime hours, hourly wages, tips, entire wages before tax, and entire wages per hour.
6. Use the weekly breakdown beneath the totals to see the two workweeks separately.

The app calculates overtime separately for each Monday–Sunday week: hours above 40 are paid at 1.5 times your saved hourly rate. At $8/hour, that is $12/hour. A 44-hour week and a 30-hour week therefore include four overtime hours, even though the combined total is below 80.

Payday is Wednesday, 10 days after the Sunday ending the pay period. Payroll navigation is independent of the dashboard’s date filters; use the payroll arrows to change the paycheck period.

For shifts crossing midnight, payroll allocates time across the relevant dates and workweeks. This can create differences from journal reports grouped entirely by shift start date.

Tax-related controls are currently hidden while the tax connection is unavailable. These figures are before-tax estimates. Entire wages include tips, which may be paid separately, so that total is not necessarily the amount deposited in your paycheck.

9. Export your shift records

1. Choose the report dates you want to export. Select All time for all saved shifts.
2. Select Export beside the shift breakdown controls.
3. Save the downloaded CSV file.
4. Open it in Excel, Google Sheets, or another spreadsheet application.

The export contains individual shifts within the selected date range, including dates, start and end times, overnight status, hours, tips, tips per hour, hourly wages, entire wages, entire wages per hour, and notes. Choosing weekly or monthly grouping does not turn the export into grouped totals.

10. Import shifts from a CSV file

1. Sign in to the account that should receive the shifts.
2. Select Import CSV beside Export on the main page.
3. Use a previous PJSTips export, or select download the CSV template and replace its example rows with your own entries.
4. Save the file as a comma-separated, UTF-8 CSV. Required columns are shift_date, start_time, end_time, and tips. notes is optional.
5. Use dates such as 2026-10-20, 24-hour times such as 16:00, and numeric tips such as 95.50, without a dollar sign. An end time earlier than the start time indicates an overnight shift. Dates from past years are supported directly.
6. Choose the file and select Preview file. The limit is 2 MB and 5,000 shifts per file.
7. Review the number of new shifts, duplicates, hours, tips, and the first 10 new entries. If errors are shown, correct the specified CSV records and preview again; nothing has been imported yet.
8. Select Import shifts to save the valid new entries to your signed-in account.
9. Select All time or a matching date range to view the imported entries.

Entries with the same date, start time, end time, and tip amount are treated as duplicates, even if their notes differ. Duplicates within the file or already in your account are skipped. Imports add entries; they do not replace existing records. To correct an existing shift, use Edit shift. Derived columns in PJSTips exports, such as hours and hourly wages, are recalculated from the imported times and your saved wage settings.

If you are preparing a CSV by hand, enclose notes containing commas or line breaks in double quotation marks, and represent quotation marks inside those notes with two quotation marks. Spreadsheet applications handle this when saving as CSV.

11. Explore the six new themes

Open Your profile, choose a Color theme, preview it, and select Save profile to keep it for future logins.

The original six themes remain available, bringing the total to 12.

12. Read this guide before signing in

Select What’s this? on the sign-in or create-account screen. It opens this overview and complete user guide, including sample credentials, CSV import instructions, and theme choices. Select Back to sign in when ready to log in.

13. Log out

Select Log out at the top of the page when finished. To switch accounts, log out and sign in with the other account’s credentials.

The sample records are fictional and end on October 22, 2026. Select All time or a historical range if a later current-period report is empty.