Reconciling your accounts is absolutely vital if you want to ensure you aren’t losing money on 3rd-party delivery services. Reconciling will help to ensure you identify discrepancies and can even help to prevent employee theft.
We’ve put together a quick (2 minute) video to help ensure you aren’t getting short-changed. You can also read the transcript below.
Our first two videos deal with state rules about sales tax remittance and programming your point of sale systems. Both are helpful background context for what I’ll be talking about in this short video: accessing 3rd party delivery statements and reconciling your accounts.
Reconciling your accounts is absolutely vital if you want to ensure you aren’t losing money on 3rd-party delivery services. If you aren’t reconciling every month, you’re probably letting a lot of money slip through the cracks – either through overpaying or oversight. Reconciling will help to ensure you identify discrepancies and can even help to prevent employee theft.
First, if your business is in a state where the 3rd-party is responsible for remitting sales tax, then you have to reconcile to avoid double paying. If you are able to distinguish 3rd-party sales in your point of sale system, it makes that reconciliation much easier.
Second, you need to reconcile in order to separate out the 3rd-party’s commission, the fees they charge, and the mark up on the site. The monthly reports offered by the 3rd-party services will break all this information out, and you should determine whether the amount the service has sent to your bank account matches your own records. If not, you’ll need to contact the 3rd-party to correct the discrepancy.
Now, one of the challenges of reconciliation is the way that each delivery service has its own portal, many of which are frequently changing. If you’re working with an accounting partner like us, you’ll need to provide us with a separate login. This is important for security purposes as well as access. Some 3rd-parties are now requiring 2-factor authentication, which makes logging in to obtain reports a challenge without dedicated logins.
Finally, reconciliation can help to identify employee theft. We’ve seen it happen where an employee tendered an order as 3rd-party delivery when in actuality the customer paid in cash. The employee pocketed the cash, and the cash count on the register was still correct at the end of the night. The discrepancy doesn’t show up until you reconcile your sales reports with those of the 3rd-party. If there’s a significant discrepancy, it could be a sign of employee theft or a problem with your point of sale system.
If you haven’t been keeping up with reconciling your accounts or if it’s proving to be a headache, we’d love to discuss how OnePoint might help. Reach out today to speak with one of our experienced account managers about OnePoints accounting services.
