Delivery app payouts: why your restaurant's books are quietly wrong
Uber Eats, DoorDash and Skip pay you days later, in lump sums, net of 15 to 30% in fees. If those deposits are being booked as sales, your revenue, your HST and your food cost are all wrong, and none of it looks wrong until someone checks.
How the money actually arrives
A customer orders $50 of food on Uber Eats. They pay $50 plus HST. Days later, Uber deposits something like $35 into your account: the order, minus their commission, minus fees, minus any promo you funded, sometimes plus tips passed through. One deposit covers dozens or hundreds of orders, batched across days that don't line up with your POS days.
Most bank feeds, and most generic bookkeepers, see that deposit and code it to Sales. It's fast, it balances, and it's wrong in three ways at once.
The three errors hiding in one deposit
1. Your revenue is understated
The customer paid $50; your books say you earned $35. Multiply across a year of delivery volume and a restaurant doing $200,000 through the apps might be reporting $140,000. That distorts every number downstream: revenue trend, food cost percentage, prime cost, your case for a lease renewal or a loan.
2. The commission expense is invisible
The 15 to 30% the platform kept never appears as an expense line. You can't see what delivery actually costs you, so you can't compare platforms, renegotiate, price menu items for delivery properly, or decide whether that volume is even worth it.
3. Your HST return is wrong in both directions
This is the expensive one. HST is owed on the gross sale the customer paid, not on your net deposit. Book the deposit and you're under-reporting HST collected. At the same time, the platform's commission invoice carries HST that you're allowed to claim back as an input tax credit, and if the commission is invisible, so is the credit. You're simultaneously under-remitting on sales and over-paying by missing ITCs. A CRA reviewer who pulls your platform statements, and they do, sees the gap immediately.
What correct looks like
Every payout gets bridged from gross to net, using the platform's own statement:
In practice this means separate income accounts per platform, an expense account for each platform's fees, a clearing account that ties payouts to the bank, and a monthly tie-out between the POS, the platform statements and the bank. Tips passed through the platform flow to a liability and out through payroll, not into revenue.
Why "close enough" catches up with you
- At HST time: returns built on deposits don't survive a review against platform statements. Reassessments come with interest, and the review usually goes back further than one period.
- At tax time: your accountant either fixes a year of coding at year-end rates or files on numbers nobody verified.
- At decision time: you can't manage food cost or platform mix with revenue that's understated by an unknown amount that changes month to month.
- At sale or financing time: a buyer's or lender's first diligence step is tying revenue to source documents. Deposits-as-revenue books fail that test.
What to do this month
- Download last month's statement from each platform's merchant portal (Uber Eats Manager, DoorDash Merchant Portal, Skip Partner Portal).
- Compare gross sales on the statement to what your books call delivery revenue for the same month. A gap means the deposit is being booked.
- Check your P&L for a commission line. No line = invisible cost = missed input tax credits.
- Fix it going forward first (correct accounts + monthly tie-out), then decide how far back to restate, ideally to the start of the current HST period.