Franchise accounting guide How do you reconcile DoorDash, Uber Eats and Grubhub payouts to the bank?

Why is the bank deposit the wrong place to start?

The deposit is what is left after the marketplace has taken its commission, its marketing charges, any refunds it issued on your behalf and, in most states, the sales tax it collected. Record the deposit as sales and three things go wrong at once: revenue is understated, the commission disappears from the P&L instead of showing as a cost you can manage, and the annual Form 1099-K — which reports gross payments — will not tie to your books.

It also matters for royalty. What a franchise agreement charges royalty on is its own defined term, and delivery is where definitions differ most. Wingstop’s 2025 franchise agreement, for example, excludes third-party delivery fees from Gross Sales^[1]; other agreements charge on the menu price of every delivery order. You can only report the right number if the gross and the fees are separate lines in the first place.

What is inside a marketplace payout?

Every marketplace statement breaks a payout into roughly the same components, under different names. Each one has a home in the books:

What commission rates do the marketplaces publish?

Commission depends on the plan each store is on, and plans can differ store by store under one owner. DoorDash publishes delivery commissions of 15% (Basic), 25% (Plus) and 30% (Premier), with pickup at 6%^[2]. Uber Eats publishes marketplace fees of 20% (Lite, lower in some cities), 25% (Plus) and 30% (Premium), 15% for self-delivery and 7% for pickup^[3].

The published rate is a check, not the answer. Promotions, plan changes mid-month and adjustments move the effective rate, which is why the commission has to come from the statement line by line rather than be estimated as a percentage of sales.

A worked example: one week, one store, one marketplace

A store on a 25% plan sells $1,240.00 of food through one marketplace in a week. It funded a $40.00 promotion, had one $12.50 refund for a missing item, and the marketplace collected and remitted the sales tax itself.

Subtotal (food sales)              1,240.00
Commission 25%                      (310.00)
Promotion funded by store            (40.00)
Missing-item refund                  (12.50)
Net payout                           877.50

Dr  Delivery clearing                  877.50
Dr  Delivery commission                310.00
Dr  Marketing — delivery promotions     40.00
Dr  Delivery adjustments                12.50
    Cr  Delivery sales — Store 1045          1,240.00

When the deposit arrives:
Dr  Bank                               877.50
    Cr  Delivery clearing                      877.50

Sales carry the full $1,240.00, the P&L shows the $362.50 the channel cost, and the clearing account is zero only when the deposit has actually landed. A clearing balance that does not clear is a payout that never reached the bank — the most common delivery problem, and invisible if you booked the deposit as sales.

Who owns the sales tax on a delivery order?

In most states a delivery marketplace is a marketplace facilitator: it collects the sales tax from the customer and files and remits it under its own account, so the tax on those orders is not yours to remit^[4]. It belongs neither in your sales nor in your sales tax payable. Put it there and you either overstate revenue or pay the tax twice. Where a state does not treat the platform as a facilitator, the tax flows to you and you remit it — check each state you operate in, not the company’s home state.

How do you match payouts to deposits across many stores?

• Match on the payout ID and amount, not the date: a payout can land one to three business days after the statement closes.
• Expect one deposit to carry several stores when the marketplace account is set up at the owner level. Split the deposit by store using the statement, so each store’s clearing account clears on its own.
• Treat a payout that is short of its own orders — orders the statement shows, money the payout does not — as an exception to chase the same week. Marketplaces limit how long you have to dispute; the window is in each platform’s merchant terms and it is short.
• Reconcile weekly. A month of unmatched payouts across twenty stores is a close-week problem that did not need to exist.

How does the Form 1099-K tie back?

Payment platforms report gross payments to you on Form 1099-K, not what was deposited after fees^[5]. For payments from third-party settlement organisations, the reporting threshold returned to more than $20,000 and more than 200 transactions for 2025 onward under the 2025 tax law^[6]. A multi-unit operator crosses it at almost every store. If your delivery sales were booked gross, the 1099-K ties to the revenue account with a short reconciliation; if they were booked net, you are rebuilding a year of fees in March.