That third number is the only one anybody will ever ask about in a courtroom — and almost no club in the country can produce it.
Opens in this browser with six weeks of a worked example floor already in it. No account, no email address, nothing installed.
Open the free demo →
The problem
The recordkeeping burden under the Fair Labor Standards Act falls on the employer. A club whose entire defence is that she was never an employee has, by its own logic, kept nothing — so when the estimate arrives there is nothing to put against it.
wage-and-hour complaints filed in federal court by dancers between 2006 and 2019. These are not nuisance suits and they do not go the club's way.
ClassAction.org →settled by Spearmint Rhino across a class that eventually spanned sixteen clubs in six states. Penthouse Executive Club settled at $8m; another overtime claim at $15m.
FindLaw →recovered per dancer at one Atlanta-area club. Clubs have also agreed to reclassify as a term of settlement, which changes the business permanently.
FindLaw →She worked, and at the end of it she owed the house. Every one of the large settlements in this sector was built out of rows that looked exactly like that. Rail finds them in your own ledger, in red, before anybody else gets the chance to — and there is no setting to turn it off.
How it works
House charges and tip-outs, with an honest answer about whether each recipient customarily receives tips. A mandatory pool that reaches house mothers, managers or security is the most reliable way there is to lose the tip credit — and with it the argument that minimum wage was ever met.
Hours, what she took in, and what she was charged. Rail measures every charge against what is actually posted on the wall, so a desk that quietly started charging a hundred flat shows up as a finding rather than as a baseline.
Ten control factors, phrased the way an owner would recognise them rather than the way a brief would. Tick them honestly and the arithmetic follows: back wages, deductions returned, liquidated damages, and what that runs to across a two-year class.
What it will never do
A vendor holding a dancer's earnings becomes a party to exactly the claim this program exists to keep off your floor. Rail records. It does not collect, hold, or move anything.
Pricing
Take the cheapest of the cases above, divide it across the years it covered, and compare. This is not a close call on price; it is a question of whether the records exist.
The floor, the roster, the schedule and the exposure meter.
Three venues or more under one owner.
One venue, plus a quarterly read of your own numbers.
Flat fee per venue, billed monthly. Your bank statement says Rail Software and nothing else. Your licence key is emailed to you within two working days of payment.
Checkout is our own bitcoin server, not a card processor — nobody we had to apply to and nobody who can close the account. The button takes you straight to it. Give your email address there — that is where your key is sent.
Questions
This is the real objection, it comes up in every meeting, and it deserves a straight answer rather than a reassurance.
The records are discoverable either way. Where an employer has no records, a court works from the employee's own reasonable estimate — which is how clubs end up settling for numbers nobody recognises. Nobody has ever lost one of these because the ledger was too good.
Rail is also the only thing that makes the exposure shrink. Off-schedule charges get fixed in a week. A tip pool gets restructured in a month. Both are visible here and invisible everywhere else.
No, and it is careful not to pretend it can. Rail has no opinion on the classification.
What it has is the list of things courts have actually looked at, and the arithmetic that follows if the answer goes the other way — on assumptions you can see and change, including which minimum wage it measures against.
Nobody. There is no Rail server holding your shifts. The records live in the page and in the browser you opened it in, and export hands you the whole ledger as one file.
We cannot be subpoenaed for what we were never given, and neither can anyone who breaks into us.
About as long as the cash-out already takes. Whoever is on the desk ticks what she was charged against the posted schedule and types two numbers.
The program does the rest, and tells you before she leaves whether that shift is about to be recorded as one she paid to work.
The demo on this page is the whole program, running on invented records. Paying gets you a licence key — one line of text, emailed to the address you give at checkout within two working days. Paste it into the program and from then on it keeps your own records. Until then, nothing you type into it is kept.
The key is checked inside the page, on your own machine. It never calls us, so there is still no account and nothing about your business goes anywhere. If you ever stop paying, your records stay exactly where they are, read-only, and Export still hands you every one of them.
Nobody can answer that today, which is the whole problem. The demo floor answers it in one row — and shows nine nights across six weeks where the fees came to more than the money.