Most restaurants in the UAE never check whether the amount a delivery platform deposited matches the sales the POS recorded, minus the commission in the contract. When we check, it rarely matches to the dirham. This is the method we run at every month close.
The POS and the platform count different things. The POS records the order at menu price, the moment it is placed. The platform deducts its commission at the rate in your agreement — sometimes on a different base than you assume — and then deducts promotion co-funding, refunds it granted to customers, cancelled-order charges and, on some platforms, delivery-fee handling. What is left is paid out on the platform's own cycle, not per calendar month.
That is four different rhythms: the order date, the statement period, the payout date and your accounting month. Every one of them is a place for a dirham to fall through, and none of them announces itself. A restaurant that only looks at the bank balance sees "delivery money came in" and moves on.
| Number | Where it comes from | Watch out for |
|---|---|---|
| POS sales by platform | POS sales report, filtered by order channel, for the period | State whether it is before or after VAT, and keep it that way |
| Contract commission rate | The signed agreement or the latest amendment | Promotional rates that were supposed to end; different rates per order type |
| Deductions on the statement | The platform's payout statement, line by line | Ads, promo co-funding, refunds, cancellations, penalties — each is its own line |
| Amount deposited | Bank statement | Payouts that cover part of one month and part of the next |
| The gap | POS sales × (1 − rate) − deductions you agreed to − deposited | Anything left is either a platform error or a term you did not know you accepted |
One line per platform for the period, ex-VAT, with the order count. Keep the export; it is your evidence.
Match by order, not by date. A payout dated the 3rd usually covers orders from the previous month.
Recalculate the commission from your own sales figure. Do not accept the platform's "commission" line as the rate — derive the rate from it and compare.
Refunds, cancellations, promo co-funding, ads. For each one ask: did we agree to this, and can we see the order it belongs to?
Every payout on the statement should appear as a deposit. Missing or partial deposits go on the list too.
Send the account manager a short table: order ID, what was charged, what the agreement says. Log the credit note when it arrives, and check that it did.
A gap has one of three causes: a platform error, a term you accepted without noticing, or a process failure on your side (an unfinalised cancellation, a refund your own staff approved). The first is recovered with order IDs. The second is fixed at the next contract review. The third is fixed in the kitchen, not in the spreadsheet. The number is only useful once you know which of the three it is — which is why every gap in a Backhouse report comes with a cause.
Monthly at minimum, per platform, as part of the close. Restaurants doing a large share of sales through delivery should look weekly, because a wrong rate or an uncontested refund compounds every day it goes unnoticed.
The POS knows what you sold; only the platform's statement knows what it deducted, and only your bank knows what arrived. Some integrations pull the statements in, which saves typing, but the two checks that find money — the contract rate and the refunds you never agreed to — still need a person reading the lines.
Raise it anyway, in writing, with order IDs. Platforms accept disputes within a window that is set in your agreement, so some of it may be gone; the point is that the same cause is almost certainly still running this month. Fix the cause, then chase what the window allows.
Yes. The Number Audit puts the payout gap in dirhams for one past month, with the cause. Monthly Ops then reconciles every platform at each month close and raises discrepancies with the platform on your behalf.
Send one aggregator statement and last month's POS summary. The Number Audit puts the gap in dirhams in ten working days.
See the Number Audit