How to Reconcile DoorDash and Uber Eats Payouts to Your POS

A delivery app's deposit is not your sales. It is your sales minus commission, service and processing fees, any marketing you bought, and refunds for missing or wrong orders, and it lands on a different day than the orders it pays for. The only reliable way to tie it out is to match the platform's own payout report to your point-of-sale (POS) numbers order by order every week, not to eyeball the deposit against a sales total. This guide shows how to do that for DoorDash, Uber Eats and third-party delivery in general, where the gaps hide, who on your team should resolve each one, and where software or AI actually helps.

The reader here is the person who closes the books for a restaurant or restaurant group in Seattle or elsewhere in Washington — an owner, controller or bookkeeper — who keeps finding that the money the apps send does not match what the registers rang up. For the broader operating picture, see our work with restaurants and hospitality.

Why the deposit is always smaller than the sales

Third-party delivery is expensive, and the deposit shows you only the net. The accounting firm Baker Tilly puts platform costs at roughly 15% to 25% of the order total, plus per-order delivery and card costs, and notes that a restaurant on a typical 3% to 5% margin can lose most of that margin to the apps. Baker Tilly also warns that a platform may simply deposit money with little detail, which is exactly why you need the itemized report behind each deposit rather than the deposit alone.

See how a restaurant group can route reconciliation exceptions for review.

DoorDash states the math plainly. Its merchant help center defines the net payout as sales minus commission, fees and marketing spend, plus or minus amendments — where amendments bundle error charges (reimbursements to customers for missing or incorrect items) and other adjustments such as rebates and corrections. Every one of those lines moves the deposit away from your POS sales total.

Map each platform's report to one set of categories

Each platform reports the same economics under different labels, so the first step is a translation table from their words to yours. Pull the itemized report — DoorDash's Payouts tab or monthly statement, Uber Eats' Payment Details report — and map every line to a fixed set of categories in your chart of accounts so all platforms are booked the same way.

One platform rule changes the arithmetic on a bad order. Uber Eats says that when it refunds a customer for an error it retains the full Uber Service Fee for the entire order and deducts the refund from your payout, while the delivery and bag fees charged to the customer are not passed back to you. So a single wrong item can cost you that item's à la carte price and the commission on the whole ticket.

A worked weekly reconciliation

The figures below are an illustrative example, not a client result or a benchmark; they show the method, not a promised outcome. Take one location, one week, one platform. To keep the arithmetic clean, assume DoorDash remits the sales tax and passes tips straight through, so we reconcile on menu subtotal only.

Your POS reports $7,000 of DoorDash menu sales for the week. DoorDash deposits $5,160. The $1,840 gap is not a loss to wave away — it is a set of lines to account for:

• Commission at 20% of $7,000: $1,400
• Marketing (a promotion you ran that week): $300
• Error charges (two refunded orders): $140

$1,400 + $300 + $140 = $1,840, which is exactly the gap, so the week ties out. Book gross sales of $7,000 as revenue and each deduction to its own expense account, rather than recording only the $5,160 deposit as revenue — that shortcut hides the fees and makes the platform's effective commission rate invisible. One trap: if your POS delivery figure already includes sales tax, add the platform-remitted tax back as its own line, or the deposit will look short by the tax amount and send you chasing a discrepancy that is not there.

Who owns each exception

This weekly method is an operating recommendation, not a guaranteed result; what makes it work is assigning every mismatch to a named person and a clear definition of resolved.

Timing is the exception people miss. DoorDash warns that its monthly statement will not equal the sum of payouts because payout dates are not the same as transaction dates, and Uber Eats notes that a customer can report an error in a later week, so the adjustment lands in a future statement. Reconcile by the date the order was fulfilled, and a late adjustment becomes a known pending item instead of a mystery next month.

In Seattle, check the commission against the 15% cap

Seattle gives restaurants one line to verify that operators in most of the country do not have. In August 2022 the City Council voted unanimously (Council Bill 120379) to make permanent a 15% cap on the commission a third-party delivery company can charge a Seattle restaurant for delivery. A restaurant can agree to pay more only for additional services such as marketing, not for delivery itself. So when you reconcile, the commission line for delivery should not exceed 15% of the order; anything above that should correspond to a marketing or other service you actually bought, and if it does not, you have a billing error to dispute. Under marketplace-facilitator rules, the platform generally remits the sales tax on app orders while you still owe tax on your direct channels, so keep the two separated in your books.

Where software and AI actually help

Most of this is a data problem before it is an AI problem. Before buying anything, check whether your POS or accounting system already imports platform reports; configuring an existing integration beats a custom build. When order volume across several locations and platforms makes a manual weekly tie-out impractical, reconciliation software can pull each platform's report, match orders and flag the exceptions, and AI can speed the matching and surface anomalies such as a commission line creeping above your contracted rate. What software should not own is judgment: whether a refund is legitimate, whether to dispute a charge and how tax is treated. Those stay with a named person, because a dashboard that marks items reconciled is only as right as the rules behind it.