Delivery app reconciliation is software that checks each payment a food delivery app makes to a restaurant against the orders the restaurant actually delivered, and wins back money that the app deducted wrongly. A common example is a refund for a disputed order. Matching two sets of records and explaining every difference between them is called reconciliation.
Why is this needed? A delivery app does not pay the restaurant the full price of its food. Every week, it pays the food sales minus many deductions. These include the app's commission, the GST on that commission, payment charges, advertising the restaurant bought on the app, discounts the restaurant agreed to fund, and taxes the app must deduct for the government. The app also deducts refunds for complaints. A restaurant on two apps receives two statements every week, each with hundreds or thousands of lines. Few owners have time to check them.
A dispute starts when a customer complains, for example about a missing item or a spilled curry. The app refunds the customer, and often takes the refund out of the restaurant's payout. The restaurant can contest the deduction, but only within a deadline, and only with evidence.
Say a biryani restaurant in Lucknow received 1,150 orders from one delivery app in a week, worth ₹4,60,000 in food sales. The app's statement shows a payout of ₹3,28,000. The software takes the restaurant's own records from its online order aggregator, and matches them with the statement, order by order. It finds three problems. Four delivered orders, worth ₹1,800, are missing from the statement. On 60 orders, a discount was charged at 20% instead of the agreed 15%, a difference of ₹2,100. And 31 orders were refunded for complaints, taking ₹11,200 from the restaurant. For 19 of these, the restaurant's packing-counter photos show the full order sealed in the bag. The software files a claim for each of the 19 before the deadline, and the app returns ₹6,900 the next week.
The software then sends the final, checked payouts to the restaurant's accounting software. It also finds patterns. If raita is reported missing from many orders, the problem is probably at the packing counter. Complaints often turn into bad reviews on the apps, so some of these companies also reply to reviews, a job of online reputation management.
How is this different from payment reconciliation at a fintech? There, software matches millions of payments with bank records. Here, the software matches one restaurant's orders with one app's statement, and then goes further: it contests the deductions it believes are wrong.