Two documents come up every time tipped workers ask about taxes: the daily tip log and Form 4070. They sound similar. They serve different purposes, and most workers only need one of them religiously.

Form 4070 — for your employer

Form 4070 (or the equivalent process at your venue) is what you give your employer to report tips you received.1 By IRS rule, employees who get $20 or more in tips in a month are supposed to report them to the employer by the 10th of the following month.2 The employer then withholds taxes on those tips.

In practice, almost no one fills out a paper Form 4070. Most venues handle this through their POS or payroll software. The output is what shows up in W-2 Box 7.

Daily tip log — for you and the IRS

The daily tip log is the contemporaneous record of every tip you received, kept by you, dated, at or near the time of the shift. It's referenced in Form 4070A as the "Employee's Daily Record of Tips," but the principle long predates the form: if you want to substantiate income, you keep daily records.3

For 2025 specifically, the daily log is what backs the No Tax on Tips deduction. The IRS is not requiring employers to break out qualified tips on the W-2 for tax year 2025 — workers have to self-substantiate.4

Why a log beats reconstruction

"I think I made about $X" doesn't survive an audit. A spreadsheet you built in March from memory doesn't either. The standard the IRS applies to substantiation is whether the record was kept at the time — which is why an app that timestamps each entry is harder to challenge than a notepad you fill out monthly.

What to log every shift

  • Date, venue, role.
  • Card tips received.
  • Cash tips received.
  • Tip-out paid out.
  • Hours worked.

Five fields. Ten seconds. The point isn't to make tax season elegant — it's to make it possible to file honestly without guessing.

General information, not tax advice. Talk to a tax professional about your specific situation, especially around state-level rules.

Sources

  1. IRS Form 4070, Employee's Report of Tips to Employer. irs.gov/forms-pubs/about-form-4070. ↩
  2. IRS Publication 531, Reporting Tip Income — $20-monthly threshold and the 10th-of-month reporting deadline. irs.gov/publications/p531. ↩
  3. IRS Publication 1244, Employee's Daily Record of Tips and Report to Employer (includes Form 4070-A). irs.gov/forms-pubs/about-publication-1244. ↩
  4. Treasury & IRS, Occupations that Customarily and Regularly Received Tips; Definition of Qualified Tips, final regulations under the One, Big, Beautiful Bill Act, 91 Fed. Reg. (Apr. 13, 2026) — for the 2025 self-substantiation expectation. federalregister.gov/documents/2026/04/13/2026-07104. ↩