Restaurant Financial Management: Track your Payouts and Tax Statements with Otter

In an industry notorious for its low-profit margins, restaurants are constantly looking to understand their bottom line—the number itself and what’s contributing to that number. But with delivery in the mix, how can your restaurant ensure it’s accurately tracking payouts and taxes across delivery apps to find out what’s working and what’s not?

Understanding your restaurant’s finances is the first step to becoming more profitable, but with third-party apps, it can be challenging to get a 360 view of how your costs compare to your profits. Consequently, gaining visibility into the pricing formulas of each third-party delivery app is essential to growing your delivery business.

This post will cover why it’s crucial for your restaurant to understand its financial health in real-time and how Otter Financials can help you track your payout and tax statements across delivery apps and locations in a single place.

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What are delivery payouts?

Payouts are the amount of money third-party apps pay you for each order.  Not to be confused with commission fees, payouts include a full breakdown of how much money is going to taxes, promotions, commission, drivers, etc. However, most third-party apps only provide a lump sum total in their payout reports as opposed to a full breakdown. Since these breakdowns vary by delivery app, tracking your payouts by platform to understand how much you’re getting for each total order transaction.

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How much do your delivery platforms charge your Restaurant?

• Doordash: Doordash has a tiered pricing structure. Operators choose from commission rates of 15%, 25%, or 30% (based on varying levels of built-in marketing).
• UberEats: Uber Eats takes a 30% commission fee on orders. Operators who use their own delivery staff can enjoy a lower cost of 15%.
• GrubHub: Grubhub charges a 30% commission fee, which is subject to change based on marketing and delivery costs. To reach an exact number, operators can enter their information into Grubhub’s profit calculator.
• SkipTheDishes: SkipTheDishes charges a commission fee anywhere between 20% and 30% depending on contract, location and order volume.

‍Understanding your taxes

Unless you operate only a single location, it can be confusing to make sure you’re paying your taxes right. Each state and province not only has its own tax rate, but also has different rules when it comes to delivery marketplaces. California, for example, has a marketplace facilitator tax such that your delivery partners will be responsible for remitting taxes to the government. Contrast this to Texas, where you’re the one who’s liable for all your taxes.

Otter Financials: Track payouts and taxes in real-time

Financials by Otter is a solution that provides visibility to restaurant operators on delivery apps’ payout and taxes breakdown. Financials offers different levels of aggregated and detailed payout views across platforms and locations so your restaurant can check against its records and understand the composition of its payouts.

Here are the 3 ways Otter Financials can help your restaurant gain visibility into the total breakdown of each order ticket:

1. Consolidate all your delivery apps’ payouts and taxes: Say goodbye to duplicates and discrepancies with clean statements that reflect actual credited transactions.

2. Easily check key numbers related to your payout and taxes: See the total payout, transactions, and the corresponding commissions and adjustments made in a given period by delivery app, locations and even transaction

3. Reconcile expectations with actuals: Do you run into order adjustments or unnecessary promotion spending? Know the breakdown of these costs and track the impact on your bottom line.

• Download your payout details per order for flexible reporting

You may be asking, “That’s a lot of numbers. What can I do with all these?”

For starters, you no longer have to blindly accept what you receive from your delivery apps. You now have an unprecedented view of what goes in - and out - of each receipt from every transaction. Notice the increasing number of adjustments in last month’s payouts? It might be worth checking what item on your menu is causing it. Was there a surprising new charge for a promotion in one of your stores? Best to take a look to see if it is efficient.

What’s more is you’ll have peace of mind that you’re not leaving money on the table, or risking penalties from the IRS or CRA, when you know that all your taxes are in order.

On top of these, get your time back from reconciling all the confusing reports from those apps and can now dedicate more time to thinking of new ways to get more customers or reduce food waste.

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How to get started

If you’re already an Otter customer, simply head over to the Financials tab within Business Manager (available to Analytics package or Otter Pro customers) or try Otter today.

Learn more about Financials here.