Auditing third-party delivery: commissions, fees, and remittance gaps

Contracted rate versus billed rate

Marketplace agreements set a commission tier, often with different rates by fulfillment type — marketplace delivery, self-delivery, pickup, and first-party white-label. Billing applies those tiers programmatically, and misapplied tiers are common after menu migrations, new-store onboarding, or a contract amendment.

The audit is arithmetic: for a sample month, recompute commission per order from gross subtotal and the contracted tier, then compare to the commission actually deducted. Differences of even 50 basis points across delivery volume are material at fleet scale.

The four other leaks

Promotional funding. Who paid for that BOGO — you, the marketplace, or both? Campaign co-funding splits are frequently billed entirely to the operator.

Tax handling. In marketplace-facilitator jurisdictions, the platform remits sales tax. Where reporting treats those orders as taxable to you as well, you can end up paying twice.

Fee stacking. Advertising spend, service fees, and packaging or small-order adjustments land in the same payout and rarely get reconciled to a budget.

Payout timing and adjustments. Deductions applied to a later payout period are effectively invisible in a store-level P&L review.

Building the reconciliation

Pull platform transaction-level exports, not the summary statement, and reconcile them to POS order records and to bank deposits. Three reconciliations, not one: order-to-order, fee-to-contract, and payout-to-deposit.

Anything that fails one of the three becomes a claim. File inside the platform's window with the export as evidence, and track reason codes by store so the recurring cases get fixed at the source.

Sizing the opportunity

On $15M of delivery sales, an audit typically surfaces recoverable commission and fee variance in the low hundreds of thousands before dispute recovery is layered on top. It is not a negotiation — it is enforcing terms you already signed.