Third-party delivery platforms like DoorDash, UberEats, and Grubhub create an accounting challenge because what they deposit into your bank account isn’t what you actually sold. They take their cut first, so a $100 order might only show up as $70 in your bank. Recording just that $70 understates your revenue and hides the true cost of using these services.

Record the full gross sale amount as revenue. If a customer orders $100 worth of food through DoorDash, your books should show $100 in sales. The delivery platform’s commission, service fees, and any other charges come out separately as expenses. This gives you an accurate picture of both your real sales volume and what you’re paying for delivery services.

The fees themselves typically go to a delivery fees or commission expense account. Some restaurant owners put them in cost of goods sold, others in operating expenses. Either approach works as long as you’re consistent. What matters is that you can see these fees separately rather than having them invisibly reduce your revenue.

Reconciliation gets tricky because the bank deposit won’t match your recorded sales. If you sold $5,000 through delivery apps in a week but only $3,500 hit your bank, you need to account for that $1,500 difference. Most delivery platforms provide weekly or bi-weekly settlement reports that break down gross sales, fees, tips, and net deposits. These reports are your source documents for recording the transactions correctly.

In QuickBooks, you can handle this a few ways. Some bookkeepers create a clearing account for each delivery platform. Gross sales post to the clearing account, fees post as expenses against it, and the net deposit clears it out. Others record a journal entry matching the settlement report. The method matters less than getting the numbers right.

Pull the settlement reports regularly rather than waiting until month end. These platforms can be inconsistent with timing, and matching deposits to the right sales period gets harder the longer you wait. A San Diego bookkeeper familiar with restaurant operations will have systems in place for handling these reconciliations efficiently.

Understanding your actual delivery margins requires this level of detail. If DoorDash takes 30% and you’re running a 25% profit margin on food, delivery orders might actually be losing money before you factor in packaging costs. You can’t see this if you’re just recording net deposits as revenue.