How should delivery app sales and fees be recorded in QuickBooks?
The deposit that lands in your bank account from DoorDash, Uber Eats, or Grubhub is not your sales figure. It is the leftover amount after the platform takes its commission, holds fees, passes through tips, and nets out refunds. Recording only the deposit understates your revenue, hides your commission expense, and throws off your sales tax reporting.
The right approach captures six pieces for each platform separately. Gross delivery sales is the full menu price the customer paid. Commissions and platform fees are what the app keeps, usually somewhere between 15 and 30 percent. Sales tax collected is the tax charged on the order, which sits as a liability until you remit it to North Carolina. Tips are customer gratuities passed through to drivers or your staff. Refunds and chargebacks cover order adjustments and cancellations. Net deposit is what actually arrives in your bank account after all of that.
Set up your chart of accounts so each platform shows separately. Create income accounts for DoorDash Sales, Uber Eats Sales, Grubhub Sales, and any others you use. Create an expense account called Delivery Platform Commissions with sub-accounts for each platform, or use class tracking if you prefer one parent commission account. Sales tax flows to your existing sales tax liability account. Tips paid out hit a tips payable liability until they are passed through.
The practical method most restaurants use is a clearing account per platform. When you pull the weekly settlement report from DoorDash, post a sales receipt or journal entry that records the gross sales as income, the sales tax as a liability, the tips as a wash or a payable, the commissions and fees as an expense, and the net amount to the DoorDash clearing account. When the deposit lands in your bank, you match it against the clearing account and it zeros out. If the clearing account does not zero out, something in the settlement report did not get recorded correctly and needs investigation.
Doing this by platform tells you which delivery service is actually making you money. DoorDash might bring in more gross sales but take a bigger commission cut than Uber Eats. Without separating them, you cannot see the difference. Refund patterns matter too. If one platform generates double the refund rate of another, that is a real cost worth tracking.
Most restaurants we see have this set up wrong at first. The bank deposit gets recorded as one lump sum of sales, the commission deduction gets missed entirely, and the owner has no idea what their actual delivery revenue is. Cleaning it up after a year is harder than setting it up correctly from the start. If your delivery activity is a meaningful piece of revenue, the setup is worth getting right through proper bookkeeping, tax and consulting services so the numbers in QuickBooks reflect what is actually happening in your business.
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