Mike Reilly spent 12 years running restaurants — from a single sub shop in the Boston suburbs to a three-location pizza group in Connecticut. After losing $14,000 in 2022 to misreported delivery payouts and discovering that his POS-vs-payout spreadsheet had been wrong for months, he started DeliverGuard to give other operators the reconciliation tooling he wished he'd had. He writes about restaurant operations, delivery-platform economics, and the spreadsheet math nobody wants to do.
Background
Mike opened his first restaurant in 2012, a 1,200-square-foot sub shop in a Boston suburb where he spent the next four years learning the operations side — food cost, labor cost, vendor negotiations, the weird seasonality of college towns. In 2017 he and a partner expanded into Connecticut with a three-location pizza concept that ran through the first delivery-platform wave (Grubhub first, then DoorDash, then Uber Eats).
By 2022 the delivery platforms were a third of revenue, and the reconciliation between Toast (the POS), each platform's payout file, and the operating bank account had become a four-hour-a-week spreadsheet. In November 2022, doing a year-end review, Mike discovered the spreadsheet had a class of errors that had been compounding silently for months: commission overcharges on a tier the restaurant had been downgraded from, refund deductions on orders Toast clearly showed were fulfilled correctly, and a promotional opt-in the platform had auto-enrolled without notice.
The total recoverable was just over $14,000. Some of it was disputable, some wasn't. The realization that stuck wasn't the dollar amount — it was that the only reason he'd caught any of it was a year-end accident.
Why DeliverGuard
The reconciliation problem is solvable. The POS knows what was ordered. The platform's payout file knows what was paid. The bank statement knows what landed. The errors only persist because nobody has time to compare the three on a weekly cadence, order by order. The platforms have no incentive to flag their own overcharges. Accountants don't have access to the raw payout files. Restaurants don't have a tool that does just this.
DeliverGuard is the tool Mike wishes he'd had in 2017. It connects the POS, the delivery platforms, and the bank, runs the line-by-line match, and surfaces the recoverable discrepancies with the evidence attached. The goal is that no restaurant on delivery platforms should ever discover a $14,000 leak in a year-end review.
What I write about
Most articles on this site are mine. The recurring topics:
- Delivery platform commission mechanics — how DoorDash, Uber Eats, and Grubhub actually compute what they pay you, where the structural gaps are, and what to look for on each platform's payout file.
- POS-to-payout reconciliation — the line-by-line workflows for matching Toast, Clover, Square, SpotOn, and other POS systems against delivery platform payouts and bank deposits.
- Original research — when we publish data analysis (like our 2026 review of 11,389 restaurant management product reviews), it's because the data didn't exist and we wanted it ourselves.
- Restaurant operations — occasional pieces on the operations side that intersect with reconciliation: end-of-day close, weekly close, monthly close.
Contact
Email hello@deliverguard.io for content corrections, research partnerships, or product questions. I read every email.