Payroll prep that respects your time.
Sidekick exists because independent restaurant operators deserve better than spreadsheets and enterprise software built for someone else.
Every pay period, the same painful cleanup.
Independent restaurant owners spend hours every pay period manually converting POS exports into payroll-ready data — making errors that cost real money and even more time to fix.
Messy POS exports
Inconsistent columns, weird date formats, missing employees.
Manual spreadsheet cleanup
Copy, paste, VLOOKUP, repeat. Every single pay period.
Errors in tips and wages
Tip pools and overtime are easy to miscalculate — and costly.
Hours wasted every week
Time you should be spending on the floor, not in Excel.
Why existing tools fall short.
You've probably tried one of these. Each comes with a real tradeoff.
Enterprise payroll suites
Built for chains with HR teams. Overpriced, overcomplicated, and the implementation alone takes weeks.
Spreadsheets
Free, flexible, and silently wrong. One bad formula and you're underpaying staff or overpaying tax.
POS-native payroll
Locks you to one POS. Switch systems and you start over. No leverage, no portability.
The middle layer that was missing.
Sidekick sits between your POS and Gusto and does the boring, error-prone work for you.
POS-agnostic
Works with Toast, Square, and Focus POS today. Switch POS systems without losing your payroll workflow.
Built for indie operators
No HR department required. If you can drag a file, you can run payroll with Sidekick.
Fast and correct
Hundreds of shifts crunched in seconds. Overtime, tips, and validation all handled automatically.
Native to Gusto
Outputs files in the exact format Gusto expects — column names, date formats, totals, all of it.
We've sat on your side of the counter.
Sidekick is designed around the real workflow of running payroll in an independent restaurant — not a generic data tool with a payroll wrapper.
"Sidekick gave us our Sunday afternoons back. What used to take three hours of cleanup now takes one upload."