They match every order on their POS against the aggregator’s settlement sheet, once a week, using a fixed five-point checklist: order count, order status, order value, commission percentage, and net payout received. When something does not line up, they note the Order ID and query it within the same payout cycle, while the records are still fresh. The entire process takes under 15 minutes if the POS already tracks online orders.
That is the short answer. The rest of this piece breaks down the exact workflow, what to check at each step, and where the gaps usually sit.
Key Takeaways
- Match your POS order data against the aggregator’s weekly payout, line by line
- Verify five things every cycle: order count, delivery status, order value, commission rate, and net deposit
- Status mismatches (delivered vs cancelled) matter most because the full order value stays unsettled
- A POS with built-in reconciliation cuts this from a 3-hour spreadsheet task to about 15 minutes
Why Can’t Reconciliation Wait Until Month-End?
India’s online food delivery market is projected to touch US$61.76 billion in revenue by 2026, according to Statista’s India outlook. At that kind of volume, a difference of a few rupees on an order stops being a rounding matter and becomes a number worth knowing.
A restaurant doing 80 delivery orders a day generates 560 individual settlement calculations every week. Each one carries the base order value, the commission on your own agreement, GST on that commission, a platform fee and a payment gateway charge. Only the first of those five appears on your own billing screen. The other four are decided after the order leaves your kitchen. Whether those calculations match your own records is not something you can know without looking.
The problem with waiting until month-end is the clock. Your partner agreement sets a window for raising a query on a payout, and it is usually short. Check yours, because a question you bring on the 28th about an order from the first week of the month may already sit outside it.
The Five-Point Reconciliation Checklist
Every weekly review should cover these five checkpoints, in this order. Skipping any one of them leaves a gap you will not see in your own reports.
| Checkpoint in Your Weekly Review | What You Compare | Why It Is on the List |
|---|---|---|
| Order count | POS total vs settlement total | Confirms every order you cooked is on the statement |
| Delivery status | POS status vs statement status per order | A status difference leaves the whole order value open |
| Order value | POS amount vs statement amount per order | Discounts and promos change the figure you get paid on |
| Commission rate | Your contracted rate vs what came off | Keeps you clear on what you agreed to pay, and why |
| Net deposit | Statement figure vs bank credit | Catches bank charges and TDS after the platform’s part |
1. Order Count Match
Pull the total number of online orders from your POS for the week. Then pull the total from the aggregator’s settlement report. The two numbers should match exactly.
If your POS shows 412 entries and the settlement report lists 407, five need explaining. They may be cancellations recorded differently at each end, orders that fell into the next cycle, or something you need to ask about. This is the fastest check and it tells you within two minutes whether the week needs a closer look.
2. Delivery Status Verification
For every order, your POS records a status: delivered, cancelled, or rejected. The aggregator’s transfer report records its own status for the same order. When these two disagree, you have a status discrepancy.
Consider this example: a QSR in Jayanagar marks Order #8834 as delivered at 9:17 PM on a Saturday. The statement for that week records it as cancelled. Which of the two is right is exactly what a query would establish, but until someone compares the two statuses the order sits unsettled and nobody has thought to ask. Without a status-level check, the difference simply never surfaces.
Status differences matter more per incident than any other kind, because the whole order value stays open rather than a few rupees of it.
3. Order Value Comparison
Even when both systems agree that an order was delivered, the rupee amount can differ. Your POS might record an order at Rs 540, but the aggregator’s ledger shows Rs 524. The Rs 16 gap usually traces back to one of three places: a rounding difference in the GST calculation, a discount applied in the customer app that your POS never captured, or a promotional deduction from a programme your listing is enrolled in.
Individually these differences are small, which is exactly why they go unexamined. Take a cloud kitchen in Aundh running two brands across two channels (an example). On any single order the difference is invisible, and it stays invisible until a week’s worth is lined up side by side. That is the whole point of doing this weekly rather than never.
4. Commission Rate Verification
Your partner agreement sets out what comes off an order. Alongside the commission there may be a platform fee, a gateway charge and deductions for any promotion your listing is enrolled in. Each of those is written down somewhere you can check.
Pull three or four line items from the statement each week and work the deduction out against your own agreement. Not against a figure you read somewhere, and not against what another restaurant told you they pay, because neither has anything to do with your contract.
Where the two do not match, there is usually a plain explanation. It might be a promotion you opted into, an order type on a different tier, or a fee you had not accounted for. Your account manager can tell you which. The value of the check is that you know what you are paying and why, rather than finding out a year later.
India’s food services sector is valued at Rs 5.69 lakh crore as of FY24, employing 8.5 million people, per the NRAI Food Services Report. In a market that size, terms differ from one agreement to the next. That is precisely why yours is the only one worth measuring against.
5. Net Deposit Verification
After all deductions, cross-check the final amount deposited into your bank account against the net figure on the aggregator’s report. Bank processing fees, TDS deductions and gateway charges sit between the transfer figure and the amount that lands in your account.
This step catches discrepancies that sit outside the platform’s system entirely. For example, if your bank applies a different processing fee than you expected, or if TDS was deducted at a different rate before the transfer reached you.
How Do You Build a Weekly Reconciliation Workflow?
The checklist above works only if someone actually runs it on a fixed day every week. Here is a rhythm that restaurants with 50+ daily online orders have found practical.
Monday morning, before the lunch rush. Download the previous week’s payout statement from each delivery channel you sell on. If your POS generates a consolidated online order report, pull that too.
Run the order count match first. It takes two minutes and tells you immediately whether the week was clean or messy. If the counts match on every channel, you can move through the remaining checks faster.
Log every difference in a single sheet. Columns: Order ID, platform, date, difference type (count/status/amount/commission), your POS value, the reported value, and the gap in rupees. This becomes the record you raise your queries from.
Raise your queries the same day. Do not let flagged entries sit until next Monday. Use whichever partner channel your agreement points you to, and send the Order IDs, the amounts and the matching screens from your POS. Restaurants that track their accounting data in a structured way find this step far quicker because the numbers are already organised.
Track each query in the same sheet. Add columns for “raised on”, “status”, and “outcome”. Over three to four weeks, this sheet becomes a pattern tracker. You will start seeing whether differences cluster on particular days, platforms or order value ranges.
How Much Is Actually at Stake for Your Outlet?
Nobody can tell you that in advance, and a general figure would not mean much for your outlet anyway. It depends on your order volume, your average ticket, how many promotions you run and how long the check has gone undone. The way to size it is to run one cycle on last week’s data and read your own answer off the sheet.
What the first cycle usually settles is whether you have a problem at all. Some owners run it, find everything lines up, and drop to a monthly check with an easy mind. Others find a handful of orders they need to ask about and keep the weekly slot. Either outcome is worth the fifteen minutes, because both replace a guess with a number.
At What Point Do Spreadsheets Stop Working?
Most restaurants start with a downloaded CSV and a spreadsheet. That works at 30-40 transactions a day. Beyond that, the time cost climbs fast.
At 80+ daily orders, a manual CSV comparison takes 2-3 hours per week. You are scanning 560 rows across your channels, matching Order IDs, and working out deduction percentages by hand. The probability of human error in that process is high, and ironically, you might miss the very gaps you are trying to catch.
A POS system that already holds your online order records takes the heaviest part of this off your hands. You supply the settlement statement from your own platform account, and the order-level matching happens on screen rather than in a sheet you rebuild every week. Count, status and value line up against your billing data, each one tied to an Order ID you can quote.
The deduction check and the bank-side check stay yours to run, but both go quickly once the orders themselves agree. Most of those two to three hours go into assembling the comparison rather than reading it, and assembling is the part you stop doing.
Restaurants using analytics and reporting tools inside their POS can also test a hunch quickly. If Tuesday night deliveries keep turning up in your differences log, the POS will show you exactly what went out on those Tuesdays, order by order, without you digging through a month of bills to find out.
At Petpooja, we have seen this shift play out across our 1,00,000+ restaurant clients. The change owners describe is less about any single recovery than about no longer wondering. The week is either clean or it has a few entries to ask about, and they know which by Monday lunchtime. Petpooja POSS includes a built-in reconciliation report that runs this comparison against the payout statement you share, at no extra cost. The settlement data stays yours: it is not stored or pulled in the background.
Conclusion
Reconciliation is not an accounting exercise you can push to your CA at month-end. It is a weekly operational habit, like checking your inventory or reviewing yesterday’s sales. The five-point checklist (order count, status, value, commission, net deposit) covers every layer between your kitchen and your bank account. Run it every Monday, note the differences with their Order IDs, and raise your questions the same day. The restaurants that do this consistently are not the ones with fewer differences. They are the ones who know about them in the week they happen, while the records are still there to check.
Frequently Asked Questions
There is no minimum, but the payoff becomes tangible once you cross 30-40 online transactions daily. Below that, differences are infrequent and small. Above 80 per day the volume of settlement calculations alone makes the check worth scheduling. A break-even calculator is a useful companion here, because it tells you how much you need to sell to cover your fixed costs, delivery deductions included.
Yes. Every channel runs on its own agreement, its own fee lines and its own settlement cycle, and each is queried through its own route. Mixing them into one sheet makes it harder to raise anything cleanly. Keep one tab per channel in your tracking sheet.
Status mismatches. An order your POS recorded as delivered but the platform settled as cancelled, or vice versa. These are the costliest because the full order value stays unsettled until it is raised. Differences in the order value itself are more frequent but far smaller, and usually trace back to a discount or promotion applied after your POS recorded the bill. A weekly review is what catches both while there is still time to raise them.
Specifics, and as few words as possible. Give the Order IDs, the exact amounts on both sides, the dates, and the matching screens from your POS. A query built on documents is a different conversation from one built on a feeling that payouts look low. Raising it inside the same payout cycle also keeps you within the window your agreement allows.
If your current POS exports online transaction data as a CSV, you can build a basic spreadsheet template that compares it against the aggregator’s settlement CSV. It is manual and time-consuming, but workable at low volumes. For anything above 80 deliveries a day, a POS that already stores your online orders saves real time. The matching runs against billing data you have, rather than a sheet you rebuild by hand every week.
