How do I handle sales from third-party delivery apps like DoorDash and Uber Eats?
The tricky part with delivery apps is that what lands in your bank account doesn’t match what you actually sold. DoorDash and Uber Eats take their cut before depositing funds, so if you just record the deposit as revenue, your books are wrong and you’re missing deductible expenses.
Record gross sales as revenue. That’s the full amount the customer paid for food. Then record the platform’s commission and fees as a separate expense. The math works out to the net deposit you received, but now your revenue reflects actual sales and you have a clear picture of what delivery fees cost you each month.
Most platforms provide weekly or bi-weekly statements that break down gross orders, commissions, tips passed through, refunds, and chargebacks. Use these statements for reconciliation instead of trying to match individual orders to deposits. The deposits often combine multiple days of sales and include adjustments that don’t show up in real-time.
Create separate expense accounts for delivery app fees. When you see that DoorDash took $4,200 in commissions last month while Uber Eats took $2,800, you can make informed decisions about which platforms are worth the cost. These fees are fully tax-deductible, so tracking them separately ensures you’re capturing every deduction.
Tips need their own handling. Most apps let customers tip, and that money passes through to you or your drivers. Tips paid out to employees aren’t your revenue. They’re wages that happen to flow through your business account. Track them separately from your sales.
Timing matters for reconciliation. A sale on Friday might not hit your bank until the following Wednesday. If you’re trying to reconcile bank deposits to individual days of sales, you’ll drive yourself crazy. Reconcile to the platform’s payout reports instead, which show exactly what each deposit contains.
Refunds and chargebacks reduce your gross sales, so they should appear as reductions to revenue rather than expenses. If a customer disputes a charge and wins, that’s not a fee you paid. You never actually earned that revenue.
A Richmond bookkeeper familiar with restaurant operations can configure your accounting software correctly from the start. Getting the structure right means you’ll know exactly what delivery is doing for your business. Some restaurants discover they’re breaking even or losing money once they see true fee percentages. Others find it’s profitable but only on certain menu items. You can’t make those decisions without clean numbers showing real sales and actual costs.
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