How to Reconcile Grubhub Statements

Reconciling Grubhub statements requires matching your payout against POS sales and bank deposits while accounting for a fee structure that is more layered than most restaurants expect. Unlike DoorDash and Uber Eats, Grubhub separates its marketplace commission from the delivery fee as two distinct line items. Add marketing premium charges and Grubhub+ subscriber adjustments, and each order can generate four or more separate deductions to verify.

Without systematic reconciliation, commission overcharges, marketing premium charges without enrollment confirmation, and refund chargebacks for correctly fulfilled orders accumulate silently week after week. This guide provides a complete workflow for verifying Grubhub payout accuracy from data export through dispute filing.

Why Grubhub Reconciliation Is Different

The defining characteristic of Grubhub’s fee structure is the explicit split between marketplace commission and delivery fee. Where DoorDash typically bundles these into a single commission percentage and Uber Eats uses a unified service fee, Grubhub shows them as separate charges on the payout statement. This creates more transparency but also more verification work: you must confirm both the marketplace rate and the delivery fee rate are correct on every delivery order.

For restaurants enrolled in Grubhub’s marketing premium program, reconciliation complexity increases further. Marketing premium charges appear as a third percentage on top of the marketplace commission and delivery fee — and they only apply to orders generated through paid promotion. Verifying that premium charges are applied only to promoted orders, at the correct rate, requires matching each charge to your active promotion enrollment records. For a full breakdown of how this structure affects your costs, see our guide on Grubhub fees for restaurants.

What You Need Before Starting

Gather these data sources before beginning your Grubhub reconciliation:

1. Grubhub for Restaurants payout report. Navigate to the Financials section in the Grubhub for Restaurants portal. Select the payout period and download the order-level transaction detail. You need individual order data, not just the payout summary, to verify rates at the order level.
2. POS delivery order report. Export your POS system’s report for Grubhub orders during the same period. This is your independent record of order counts, timestamps, and subtotals.
3. Bank deposit records. Pull your bank statement showing Grubhub deposits. Grubhub deposits on a weekly schedule, typically arriving Tuesday or Wednesday for the prior Monday through Sunday period.
4. Merchant agreement and marketing enrollment records. Have your Grubhub partnership agreement and any active marketing premium enrollment records accessible. You need these to verify contracted rates and confirm which orders should carry premium charges.

Step-by-Step Reconciliation Workflow

Step 1: Verify Order Counts

Start by comparing the total number of Grubhub orders in your POS report against the total on the Grubhub payout statement. Any count mismatch indicates missing orders — the highest-impact discrepancy type because the entire order value is at stake. Note that cancelled orders may appear in your POS but not on the Grubhub statement, or vice versa, depending on when in the order lifecycle the cancellation occurred.

Step 2: Match Individual Orders

Match each order from the Grubhub statement to the corresponding POS record using order ID, timestamp, or amount. Create a working spreadsheet with columns for: order ID, order date, POS subtotal, Grubhub subtotal, marketplace commission, delivery fee, marketing premium, Grubhub+ adjustment, refund charges, and net payout. Flag unmatched orders for investigation before proceeding.

Step 3: Verify Marketplace Commission Rate

For each matched order, calculate the effective marketplace commission rate: commission amount divided by order subtotal. Compare this to your contracted rate. Marketplace commission errors are less common than on other platforms because the rate is clearly separated, but they do occur — particularly when contracts are renegotiated or when an order is miscategorized between delivery and pickup.

Step 4: Verify Delivery Fee Rate

For each delivery order, calculate the effective delivery fee rate: delivery fee amount divided by order subtotal. Compare to your contracted delivery fee percentage. Also verify that delivery fees are charged only on orders where Grubhub dispatched a driver. If you operate a hybrid model with both Grubhub delivery and restaurant delivery, delivery fee charges on self-delivery orders are a common error worth investigating.

Step 5: Audit Marketing Premium Charges

Identify every marketing premium charge on the statement. These appear as a separate line item or as an additional percentage on orders generated through promoted placements. For each premium charge, verify that the corresponding order was genuinely generated through a paid promotion campaign you enrolled in. Cross-reference against your active campaign records in the Grubhub for Restaurants portal. Premium charges on orders outside enrolled campaigns are directly disputable. For more context on how marketing premiums work, see our guide on Grubhub commission rates.

Step 6: Review Grubhub+ Subscriber Adjustments

Grubhub+ is Grubhub’s customer loyalty program. When Grubhub+ subscribers order from your restaurant, delivery fees may be waived or subsidized for the customer, and Grubhub may pass a portion of that subsidy cost to the restaurant as an adjustment. Review each Grubhub+ adjustment to confirm it falls within your program agreement terms and that the subsidy amount is correctly calculated.

Step 7: Check Refund Chargebacks

Examine every refund or chargeback line item on the statement. For each one, verify whether the corresponding order was fulfilled correctly according to your POS records. Not all refunds are the restaurant’s responsibility — delivery errors, driver issues, and platform failures should be absorbed by Grubhub. Verify whether the marketplace commission and delivery fee on refunded orders were reversed. If not, you paid platform fees on revenue you never received.

Step 8: Reconcile Net Payout to Bank Deposit

Sum the net payout amounts for each payout period and compare to the corresponding bank deposit. Account for the timing gap between the statement period and the deposit arrival — typically two to three business days. If amounts do not match, investigate for holdbacks, processing adjustments, or errors between statement generation and bank transfer.

Grubhub Reconciliation Checklist

Example: Single Week Grubhub Reconciliation

The Delivery Fee Misclassification Problem

One of the most common Grubhub discrepancy types is delivery fee charges on orders where the restaurant used its own delivery drivers. Because the marketplace commission and delivery fee are separate line items, a misclassified order generates an incorrect delivery fee charge while the marketplace commission may be correct — making the discrepancy easy to miss if you only spot-check the commission line.

If your restaurant operates a hybrid delivery model (some orders via Grubhub drivers, some via your own team), maintain a clear record of which orders were self-delivered. Cross-reference this against delivery fee charges on your Grubhub statement to identify any misclassified orders. Even at 8% delivery fee, a misclassified order with a $45 subtotal represents a $3.60 overcharge — and across dozens of orders per week, these accumulate quickly.

Marketing Premium Reconciliation

Grubhub’s marketing premium program is powerful for visibility but creates the most reconciliation complexity of any Grubhub fee type. The premium rate (typically 5% to 17.5% depending on the placement tier) is charged on top of your marketplace commission on orders that Grubhub attributes to your paid promotion. The key verification questions are:

• Is the premium rate on each charged order consistent with your enrolled campaign tier?
• Are premium charges only appearing on orders within your active campaign date range?
• Is the premium being calculated on the correct order subtotal?
• Are there premium charges on orders that originated through organic search rather than promoted placement?

Grubhub’s attribution logic for determining which orders qualify as “promoted” is not always transparent. If you see premium charges significantly exceeding the expected number of promoted orders based on your enrollment terms, investigate whether Grubhub’s attribution methodology is consistent with what you agreed to.

Automating Grubhub Reconciliation

Manual reconciliation of Grubhub statements is more labor-intensive than DoorDash or Uber Eats because of the additional fee layers. For a restaurant processing 300 Grubhub orders per week, manually verifying marketplace commission, delivery fee, marketing premium, and Grubhub+ adjustments on each order requires checking up to 1,200 individual line items per week. At two minutes per order for a full review, that is 10 hours per week.

Automated reconciliation tools address this by ingesting Grubhub statement data, POS records, and bank deposits, then matching orders algorithmically and flagging discrepancies at each fee layer. The delivery reconciliation calculator can help estimate the potential value of this approach for your Grubhub order volume. For a broader view of multi-platform reconciliation, see our guide on how to audit delivery platform fees.