Decode the payout before you book it
A marketplace deposit arrives as one number, and none of the interesting facts survive the compression. Behind it sit gross orders at menu price, the 13% HST the platform collected as your agent, a commission of 25 to 30% of each ticket, HST charged on that commission, order-error refunds and whatever promotions you funded that week. Book the deposit as sales and three things go wrong at once: revenue is understated, HST is remitted on the wrong base, and the input tax credits sitting in the commission line are abandoned.
Commission tiers differ by platform and plan, and the promo charges change monthly, which is why the statement, not the deposit, is the source document. We post it line by line:
| Payout statement line | Where it belongs in the books |
|---|---|
| Gross food and drink orders | Revenue at full menu price, tracked by platform |
| HST collected on those orders | Your HST liability: the app collected it for you, and you remit it |
| Commission and service fees | An expense, with the 13% charged on it claimed as an input tax credit |
| Promotions and sponsored listings | Advertising expense, its HST also claimable |
| Order-error refunds | A visible sales adjustment, never quietly netted away |
| The deposit itself | The residual that must reconcile to all of the above |
What those gross figures mean for the HST return, and what a reviewer matches them against, is covered on our pizza shop tax services page.
Three order channels, one weekly reconciliation
Orders reach a takeout counter three ways: walk-ins at the till, the phone, and the tablets. Pizza-specific POS systems like SpeedLine and HungerRush take app orders by direct integration, and aggregators like Otter and Deliverect inject them for everyone else, but injection is not reconciliation. Orders cancelled after the dough was stretched, refunds the platform granted without asking, and the occasional order that never reached the POS at all only surface when the statement is tied back to the POS close, order for order.
We run that three-way match weekly in QuickBooks Online: platform statement to POS by channel, POS to bank. Phone and counter orders carry the same discipline, so every deal code and coupon maps to a POS key and discounting stays visible instead of vanishing into gross sales. Supplier invoices, the cheese, flour and box deliveries that arrive by the skid, flow in through Dext the week they land, so food cost is current rather than reconstructed at year-end.
Cash after midnight
A delivery shop's cash risk peaks when everyone is tired. Drivers carry floats, cash-on-delivery orders settle at the end of a shift, and the biggest closes happen at 2 a.m. on Friday and Saturday. The controls are unglamorous and they work: a fixed float signed out to each driver, a settlement sheet that ties every driver's cash to the POS dispatch report before they go home, over/short recorded by driver instead of absorbed, safe drops through the night, and the deposit banked intact the next morning.
Nothing gets paid from the drawer, ever; driver reimbursements and the odd cash-and-carry supply run go through the corporate card, so deposits stay whole. Cash-heavy food businesses hold standing CRA attention, and the per-driver settlement file is the record that answers questions before they harden into assessments. If a letter arrives anyway, CRA Audit & Review Support takes over the correspondence.
Payroll, and a month-end that shows the channels
The roster mixes cooks, counter staff, students on weekends and drivers paid a wage plus a per-kilometre amount for their own cars, set up so the allowance stays non-taxable. Payroll runs inside the engagement, with T4s, ROEs for departing students and public-holiday pay handled as part of the same close. End-to-End Accounting is one engagement for the whole loop: bookkeeping, payroll, financial reporting and tax filing under one roof.
Month-end statements split the shop into counter, own-delivery and marketplace orders, because a blended margin flatters the apps. What each channel truly leaves behind, and what to do about it, is the ground of our pizza shop CFO work. For shops across Mississauga and the GTA, the fee is quoted in writing after a free 15-minute discovery call, so it is known before the work starts.
