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Your Quarterly VAT Return with Delivery Platform Income: A Checklist

The VAT return is the point where a quarter's worth of loose delivery reconciliation becomes visible. Everything that was approximately right in week six is now a number on a return, and if the platform income was recorded net of commission, the return will understate turnover and overstate nothing — which is the wrong direction to be wrong in.

This is a checklist for the quarter-end itself. It assumes you are VAT-registered and take orders through at least one delivery platform.

Before you start: the deadline

HMRC's stated deadline is straightforward: "The deadline for submitting your return online is usually one calendar month and 7 days after the end of an accounting period. This is also the deadline for paying HMRC."

So for a quarter ending 31 March, the return and the payment are both due by 7 May. Two points that catch people out:

  • It is one deadline, not two. Filing on time and paying late is still late.
  • The payment must clear by that date, so the effective cut-off for a slower payment method is earlier than the stated one.
If you are not yet registered, the threshold is £90,000: HMRC requires registration if "your total taxable turnover for the last 12 months goes over £90,000 (the VAT threshold)" or you "expect your taxable turnover to go over £90,000 in the next 30 days." Note that this is measured on taxable turnover, which for a delivery restaurant means gross order value — not the net deposits that reached your bank. Restaurants using platforms heavily sometimes cross the threshold well before their bank statements suggest it.

The checklist

1. Confirm every platform period is reconciled

Before anything else, check that each payout period in the quarter has been posted and ties to a bank deposit. A quarter typically contains twelve or thirteen weekly payouts per platform; if you run all three, that is around forty reconciliations.

Any period that has not been reconciled is a period whose gross sales figure is an estimate. Work through the multi-platform reconciliation guide for the routine, or use the free reconciliation checklist as a per-period tick sheet.

2. Check sales are recorded gross, not net

This is the single highest-value check on the list.

Take one platform, one settled period. Compare the sales figure in your books against the gross order value on the platform statement. They should be the same number. If your books show something close to the bank deposit instead, sales are being recorded net of commission — and every period in the quarter will have the same error.

The symptom is easy to spot in aggregate: the ratio of your recorded delivery sales to platform gross totals should land close to 1.0 (or (1 − your effective rate) if what landed in your books was actually the net deposit rather than gross sales). If you know your typical effective commission rate is around 30%, expect a ratio close to 0.7 when sales have been recorded net; at a lower or higher effective rate the "recording net" threshold sits somewhere else, so check your own effective rate first rather than assuming 0.7 is universal.

3. Check output VAT on delivery sales, by rate, on the gross order value

This is the exposure that gets missed once sales are recorded gross (step 2) and the commission VAT is being chased (step 4) — the output VAT on the sales themselves. HMRC's guidance is that "hot takeaway food and drink that meets certain tests set out below is standard-rated," while "cold takeaway food and drink is zero-rated, as long as it's not of a type that's always standard-rated."

Confirm two things for the quarter: that output VAT was calculated on the gross order value (not the net deposit), and that it was split correctly between standard-rated and zero-rated lines if your menu is mixed. Cold items in a delivered meal are not automatically zero-rated: HMRC lists "delivery of cooked ready-to-eat food or meals (with or without crockery or cutlery)" among its obvious examples of catering (VAT Notice 709/1, section 2.1), which is standard-rated, so check which delivered items, if any, you treat as zero-rated. This is the larger of the two VAT exposures on a mixed-rate menu, and it is the one HMRC's own data-matching against the platforms' reported figures (step 6) would surface first.

4. Reclaim the VAT on commission

Platform commission is a standard-rated supply of services to your business, and the VAT on it is input tax for a VAT-registered restaurant.

Add up the commission VAT across every platform and every period in the quarter. On meaningful delivery volume this is not a small figure — a restaurant paying £2,600 of commission in a quarter has £520 of input tax attached to it — and it is the amount most commonly left unclaimed, because it never appeared as a separate line when the deposit was categorised.

Our VAT on delivery commissions tool will estimate your weekly commission VAT from your sales and an average commission rate. For the return itself, use the VAT shown on each platform statement.

5. Check the recovery position on mixed-rate menus

If everything you sell is standard-rated, the commission input tax is straightforwardly recoverable and you can move on.

If you sell zero-rated food, the position needs more care — not because recovery is restricted, but because the sales themselves need splitting correctly. Zero-rated sales are still taxable supplies (VAT Notice 706's definition of partial exemption requires exempt supplies, which cold takeaway food is not), so they do not restrict commission-VAT recovery in the way exempt supplies would. What the split does affect is step 3: a menu that spans both rates needs its delivery sales apportioned by rate, not lumped together. The VAT on delivery commissions guide works through this, and the restaurant VAT guide covers the wider mixed-rate picture.

6. Account for refunds in the right period

Refunds and clawbacks reduce your sales, and they frequently land in a payout period after the order they relate to. At quarter-end, check whether any refunds relate to orders in the previous quarter, and whether refunds have been double-counted — some platform statements net them off the gross figure already, in which case adding a separate refund line subtracts them twice.

Our guide to delivery platform refund disputes covers challenging the ones that should not have been charged in the first place.

7. Reconcile against what HMRC already holds

Under the Platform Operators (Due Diligence and Reporting Requirements) Regulations 2023, platforms must "collect information about sellers", "verify the information collected", and "identify reportable sellers in respect of each reportable period", keeping records "for a period of five years beginning with the day after the end of the reportable period to which they relate."

The practical effect is that HMRC receives, independently of your return, what each platform paid you (broken down by quarter) and, reported separately, the fees, commissions and taxes it deducted. Before filing, it is worth sanity-checking that your declared delivery turnover is in the same territory as those reported amounts added together. A persistent gap in the same direction, quarter after quarter, is exactly the pattern that invites a question. The free HMRC readiness checker will flag whether your current process has this gap, and our guide to HMRC's digital platform reporting rules explains the mechanism.

8. File through compatible software

HMRC's requirement is that "You must now use compatible software to keep your VAT records and file your VAT Returns." That compatible-software list includes "bridging software to connect non-compatible software (like spreadsheets) to HMRC systems", so a spreadsheet-plus-bridging-software setup qualifies. Note that filing is only half of it: VAT Notice 700/22 states that "all VAT registered businesses need to keep digital records and submit VAT Returns to HMRC using compatible software", so digital record-keeping is a requirement in its own right alongside the filing method.

Filing correctly through approved software does not make the underlying figures right — see our guide to Making Tax Digital for restaurants.

A quarterly rhythm worth keeping

The restaurants that find VAT quarters painless are not doing anything clever at quarter-end. They are reconciling each payout when it arrives, so the quarter-end is a review rather than a reconstruction.

If a quarter-end currently takes you a full day, the fix is almost never a better VAT process — it is the forty unreconciled payouts sitting behind it.

Key takeaways

  • The return and the payment are both due one calendar month and 7 days after the period ends.
  • The registration threshold is £90,000 of taxable turnover — measured on gross order value, not net deposits.
  • Record delivery sales gross. Net-of-commission sales understate turnover on every single period.
  • Commission VAT is recoverable input tax. Total it across all platforms for the quarter — it is the most commonly missed claim.
  • Check refund timing and double-counting before filing.

Doing this properly means every payout in the quarter was reconciled when it arrived, with the VAT split correct on each. That is the gap PayoutLedger is being built to close: upload each platform's report, get VAT-correct journals, and reconcile every payout to the bank deposit. Join the waitlist for early access.

Sources

Stop reconciling manually

PayoutLedger is being built to reconcile your Deliveroo, Uber Eats, and Just Eat payouts automatically — VAT-correct and pushed into Xero. Join the waitlist for early access.

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