No invoice, no menu price, just a number you have to pick

A tip sits on top of a bill and a gift sits inside an occasion. This category is neither: it is the money you hand to someone you hired yourself, where nothing arrives to tell you what the job was worth. There is no line item, no HR department, and usually no conversation about it either.

These tools start from what people were actually paid, where a real rate table exists, and say plainly when they have run out of one. They also do the part nobody expects to need: past a certain number of hours, or a certain amount in a year, an ordinary arrangement quietly becomes employment, and the rules that apply to it are federal rather than a matter of taste.