Guide
If you've ever pulled up your bank deposit from DoorDash and it didn't match what your POS says you sold that week, you're not doing anything wrong. Nobody's payout matches their sales — that's not a bug, it's how the marketplace model works. The problem isn't the gap. The problem is most operators never actually look at why the gap is what it is, which means a billing error, a bad commission tier, or a cluster of error charges can sit there quietly costing you money for months.
This is the process to catch that. It takes about 30 minutes a month once you've built the template once, and it's the single highest-leverage financial habit an operator running third-party delivery can build.
Your POS records the sale the moment the order comes in — full menu price, full tax, tip included. DoorDash pays you the sale minus everything they're entitled to take, on their own weekly (or daily, if you've opted in) schedule, not yours. The gap between those two numbers is made up of predictable categories. Once you know them, "reconciliation" stops being a mystery and becomes a checklist.
Here are the standard leaks, in the order they usually show up:
Marketplace commission. DoorDash's Partnership Plans price commission by tier — Basic (15%), Plus (25%), or Premier (30%) on delivery orders, with pickup orders charged a flat 6% on every tier regardless of plan. This is the biggest line item by far, and it's worth confirming which plan you're actually on (Settings in the Merchant Portal) rather than assuming.
Payment processing fees. A separate charge, typically in the 2.9–3.0% range of the gross order, on top of commission — not folded into it.
Marketing / Sponsored Listings spend. If you're running self-serve ads, DoorDash charges per confirmed order placed through the ad (a bid amount you set), attributed to any order placed within 7 days of the customer clicking. This shows up as its own line, separate from commission.
Refunds on canceled or customer-disputed orders. If an order gets refunded, you don't get paid for it — but if your POS already logged the sale before the cancellation synced, your systems will disagree.
Error charges. When a customer reports an item missing, wrong, or poor quality, DoorDash refunds the customer and passes some or all of that cost back to you — typically 25% to 100% of the affected item's price plus tax, depending on the situation. DoorDash generally does not charge you for issues outside your control (late deliveries, no-shows, temperature complaints), and won't issue an error charge at all if the customer reports it 72+ hours after delivery.
Chargebacks. These are a different animal from error charges — a chargeback happens when the customer disputes the charge directly with their bank or card issuer, not through DoorDash's own complaint flow. They're rarer but hit harder, and they age onto your statement differently than error charges do.
Adjustments / amendments. Corrections DoorDash applies after the fact — these can go either direction (money added back or taken out), and they're easy to miss because they don't always land in the same payout cycle as the original order.
Timing mismatch. Not a fee — a calendar problem. DoorDash's payout cycle (weekly, Monday–Sunday by default, deposited a couple business days later) rarely lines up perfectly with your accounting month or your POS's reporting window. An order placed August 31st might pay out in a September deposit. If you're comparing calendar-month POS sales to calendar-month payouts without adjusting for this, you'll manufacture a "gap" that isn't real.
Do this once a month, for the prior calendar month, once your DoorDash data has finalized (give it a few days after month-end so all payouts in that window have posted).
In the Merchant Portal, go to Financials → Payouts for finalized payout totals and order-level detail — this is the number DoorDash itself tells you to reconcile against, as opposed to the Transactions tab, which shows estimates. For a fuller export with error charges and adjustments broken out separately, use Reports → Create report → Financial report, set your date range, and download the CSV once it's ready (available for 7 days after creation).
Filter your POS report to the DoorDash channel only, same date range. If your POS tags orders by source, this is a five-minute export. If it doesn't, you're already looking at your first fix: get DoorDash orders tagged as their own channel in the POS so this step doesn't require manual sorting every month.
Gross sales in your DoorDash report should be close to gross sales in your POS for that channel (small gaps are normal — see the timing note above). Everything below gross sales in the DoorDash report — commission, processing fees, marketing, refunds, error charges, chargebacks, adjustments — is a deduction that gets you to net payout. Line them up side by side.
This is the artifact that makes next month's version take 10 minutes instead of 30. Template below.
Before you accept the variance as "just how it is," check these in order — they cover the overwhelming majority of surprises:
Error charges can be disputed in the Merchant Portal, but only within 14 days of the delivery, and only with Admin or Store Manager-level portal access — so don't let this sit until the following month's reconciliation. Anything you're not disputing, file the variance table so you have a paper trail across months.
Copy this into a spreadsheet and fill it in monthly. The "Variance" column is your answer key — if it's not close to zero, you know exactly which line to chase.
| Line item | POS says | DoorDash report says | Variance | Notes |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Gross sales (DoorDash channel) | Should roughly match before deductions | |||
| Marketplace commission | — | Confirm your plan tier (Basic/Plus/Premier) | ||
| Payment processing fees | — | ~2.9–3.0% of gross | ||
| Marketing / Sponsored Listings | — | Compare to orders attributed | ||
| Refunds (canceled/disputed orders) | ||||
| Error charges | — | Check for item/shift patterns | ||
| Chargebacks | — | Bank-initiated, not DoorDash-mediated | ||
| Adjustments / amendments | — | Can be additions or deductions | ||
| Net payout | Should tie to bank deposit |
For orders placed through the DoorDash marketplace app with Dasher delivery, operators typically net 70–80% of gross sales after commission, processing fees, marketing spend, and error/refund deductions. Pickup orders net meaningfully higher since commission drops to a flat 6%.
If you're consistently landing below 70%, that's not just "how delivery apps are" — it's a signal to check, in order: your plan tier (are you paying Premier-level commission without using Premier-level marketing tools), your marketing spend-to-order ratio, and whether error charges are clustering around a specific item or packaging issue you can actually fix.
Twelve of these a year gets you a real audit trail, not just a vague feeling that "DoorDash takes too much."
Mise does exactly this reconciliation every month for clients — DoorDash, Uber Eats, and Grubhub together, not one at a time — so you see your real channel profitability in one place instead of three separate portals that don't talk to each other. If you want a free channel-profitability review to see where your own numbers stand, reach out and we'll run it against your actual data.