A number lands in the bank and nobody knows why
Every week each app pays you. Deliveroo on one day, Uber Eats on another, Just Eat on its own cycle. Each payout is a single figure. Your accountant wants to know what the gross sales were and what the fees were, and you download a PDF or CSV statement from each partner portal, each laid out differently, each covering a slightly different week.
You try to check it. The order count on the statement does not match the tablet history. There is a line called adjustments. There is a marketing charge you do not remember agreeing to. There are refunds for orders the kitchen swears went out complete. After an hour you give up and just accept the figure, because checking it properly would take all evening.
Why the payouts are so hard to check
Each app calculates your payout differently. The commission rate can vary by order type, such as app delivery versus collection or your own riders. Promotions you opted into are funded partly or wholly by you. Refunds and missing-item claims are deducted in the week they are settled, not the week of the order. Some charges are weekly flat fees. The statement is correct by the app's rules, but those rules are spread across a contract, a help centre and several emails.
Meanwhile your own records live in the tablets, which only keep a short history, and the till, which may not know about app orders at all. So there is no independent list of orders to check against, which is why the check never happens.
What goes unchecked
| Item on the statement | Why it matters |
|---|---|
| Commission | Rates can differ by order type and change with contract terms |
| Promotion charges | Offers you funded may cost more than they earned |
| Refunds and adjustments | Claims you might have disputed if you had seen them |
| Flat fees | Tablet, marketing or service charges easy to forget |
| Timing differences | Orders settled in a later week confuse monthly figures |
The point is not that the apps are getting it wrong. It is that you cannot tell whether they are, and you cannot tell which channel actually makes you money once everything is taken off. That is the question that should decide how much effort you put into each app.
How we tie every payout back to orders
- We collect order data and statements from each app, through its reporting interface where one is available to you, or from the statement exports where it is not, on a schedule rather than by hand.
- Each order is stored with its gross value, commission, promotion contribution, delivery fee and any refund or adjustment, in one common layout for every app.
- Each payout is matched to the orders and charges it covers, and the tool shows any difference between what the statement says and what the order data adds up to.
- Refunds and adjustments are listed with their original order, so you can decide which ones are worth disputing through the app's normal process.
- A weekly and monthly summary shows gross sales, fees and net income per app, and can be posted to Xero or QuickBooks as a clean journal, so your bookkeeper stops unpicking PDFs.
We do not interpret your contracts for you or give accounting advice. We show the numbers the apps report, side by side, and your accountant decides how to treat them.
What Monday morning looks like afterwards
The week's payouts arrive and are already matched. You open one page and see, per app, what customers spent, what was taken off and what reached the bank. A short list shows anything that did not reconcile and every refund over a size you set. Your bookkeeper gets the journal, not a folder of statements.
- Every payout explained, line by line
- Refunds visible while there is still time to question them
- A true comparison of what each app earns you
- Bookkeeping entries prepared from the data rather than typed in
Could this be your weekly payout?
- You accept app payouts without checking them.
- Your bookkeeper asks for gross sales and fees and gets PDFs.
- You could not say which delivery app earns you the most after fees.
- Refunds appear that nobody in the kitchen recognises.
- Promotions were switched on and nobody measured what they cost.