Wolt and Glovo Delivery: Restaurant Margins and Earnings by Channel
Contents
- Wolt and Glovo delivery: what metric margin represents
- What expenses to deduct from delivery sales
- How to compare dine-in, pickup, and aggregators
- How to reconcile aggregator reports with the POS
- How much a restaurant makes on delivery: a fictional calculation
- What decisions to make based on calculation results
- How to account for overhead and spare kitchen capacity
- How to organize a regular delivery performance review
- Frequently asked questions
Wolt and Glovo delivery: margin across these channels requires a separate calculation. The question of how much a restaurant makes on delivery cannot be settled by order totals or aggregator payouts. Take sales, food and packaging costs, and contractual deductions. Then verify discounts, refunds, and courier pay if you handle delivery in-house.
You will build a calculation for dine-in, pickup, and delivery, reconcile the aggregator portal with the POS, and review a fictional example in tenge. Based on the results, you will be able to decide which menu to offer in the channel, when to adjust promotion terms, and which orders to review with the manager.
In brief:
- Calculate channel contribution after an agreed set of direct expenses.
- Commissions and advertising expenses depend on your contract. Use your own confirmed amounts.
- Include an order already recorded in the POS in total revenue only once.
- Separate the sale, settlement with the aggregator, and cash receipt into your account.
- Before expanding delivery, verify contribution margin, kitchen load, and the impact on dine-in service.
Wolt and Glovo delivery: what metric margin represents
In this article, delivery margin represents channel sales contribution after selected direct expenses. Note the cost breakdown next to the metric. That way, the manager understands what has already been deducted and which venue obligations still need to be covered by the remaining amount.
Channel contribution = sales after agreed accounting of discounts and returns minus food, packaging, and direct channel expenses.
If you want to show a percentage, divide contribution by the corresponding revenue. Compare identical definitions. One team might call margin the remainder after food costs alone, while another also subtracts delivery and advertising. Lock in your formula before comparing channels and periods.
To calculate a restaurant's net profit, you also need rent, payroll, other operating expenses, and liabilities. Coordinate how they are recorded with your accountant. A positive contribution from an individual order does not yet answer the question of the venue's overall performance. The full framework is available in our restaurant analytics guide.
What expenses to deduct from delivery sales
Start with food cost. For each order, take the dish composition and current recipe cards. Account for portion sizes, substitutions, and extra ingredients. Compare standard norms against available actual usage data. The calculation procedure is covered in the article on how to calculate food cost.
Add packaging. Link containers, bags, and other consumables to the order items. If multiple dishes share packaging, choose an allocation rule. If exact records are not yet available, note an estimate and verify it during a test assembly with a kitchen team member.
Take commission rates from your contract and settlement statements. For Wolt, Glovo, Yandex Eats, and Chocofood, verify your own terms. These services operate in Kazakhstan, but their general market presence does not define terms for a specific restaurant. Commissions and advertising expenses depend on your contract.
Analyze discounts and returns. Determine who funds the discount and how it appears in the report. Deduct the restaurant's expense only once. If POS revenue already reflects the discount, subtracting it again will distort contribution margin. For returns, check the initial sale, the customer refund, and what happened to the prepared dish.
Account for in-house couriers. If you pay for delivery yourself, determine costs per order or per period. With a shared schedule, record what portion you assign to the channel. Retain source documents and explicitly label any allocation that cannot yet be verified down to a specific order.
How to compare dine-in, pickup, and aggregators
Compile channel data for the same period. Choose uniform rules for revenue and food cost valuation. For each channel, show the expenses that occur during its operation. Do not transfer contractual delivery commissions to dine-in just to keep the same number of rows in the table.
| Channel | What to include in direct calculations | What to check before drawing conclusions |
|---|---|---|
| Dine-in | Food costs and confirmed direct expenses of selected sales | Menu mix, discounts, returns, and staff workload |
| Pickup | Food, packaging, and related order expenses | Who placed the order, who funds the promotion, and where payment was recorded |
| Aggregator delivery | Food, packaging, contractual deductions, and advertising | Service reports, restaurant-funded discounts, and settlement periods |
| In-house delivery | Food, packaging, agreed courier expenses, and customer acquisition | Order flow to the POS, courier shift costs, and cancellations |
Separate menu comparison from channel comparison. First, compare the same dish across different channels using identical recipes. Then look at overall order composition. A channel with a higher contribution per order might simply have a different product mix. You need to explain this before applying conclusions to the rest of the menu.
Keep the same formula for a location in Almaty and a location in Astana. Factor operating conditions, rent, and staffing into the overall venue calculation. If delivery ties up the kitchen during peak dine-in hours, add order queues and fulfillment times to your financial review.
How to reconcile aggregator reports with the POS
Extract order data from available exports and partner portal reports. Available fields and historical depth vary by service. Before automating, request a sample, status descriptions, and adjustment procedures. Use them to determine which transactions you can reconcile without manual review.
- Select a control period. Start with a closed business day at a single location. Save the original POS and aggregator reports, export dates, and selected filters.
- Match locations and dishes. Use consistent IDs and a mapping table. Renaming a dish must not create a duplicate sale for the same order.
- Link the order to the receipt. Check for an available identifier. If it is missing in either source, agree on verification using a combination of fields and flag ambiguous matches for manual review.
- Explain the amounts. Trace the path from order items down to the amount after discounts, refunds, and deductions. Show discrepancies and identified underlying reasons separately.
- Reconcile settlements and payouts. Check which period the service transferred the money for. Keep the sale on the agreed date, and show the payout in the settlement reconciliation.
Keep separate lists: the order is only in the portal, the receipt is only in the cash register, amounts differ. Assign an owner to each line. After fixing the issues, repeat the reconciliation for the period and make sure you did not create a duplicate when uploading the updated report.
Check several orders from start to finish. Select a regular purchase, a discounted order, and an available refund. For each, keep the cash register record, the portal line, and the calculation breakdown. If there is no matching event in the period, check it later using confirmed data. Do not replace missing proof with assumptions about service rules.
For Kaspi payments, use confirmed receipts and follow the same verification procedure. The payment helps reconcile the calculation, but analyzing the menu requires sales line items. Treat interest in the venue on 2GIS separately until you can confirm a link between an inquiry and a specific order.
How much a restaurant earns on delivery: a fictional calculation
Suppose a hypothetical cafe reviews its delivery performance for a week. All amounts below are fictional and rounded. The commission is also made up for this example and does not apply to any specific service. This is an educational calculation and cannot be used to evaluate terms of Wolt, Glovo, or Yandex Eda.
For simplicity, assume all selected orders are completed. A hypothetical service handles delivery, so there is no in-house courier in this example. Deductions and advertising are not included in the food cost. The cafe funds the discount, and refunds are shown separately from it.
| Calculation line item | Fictional amount, tenge |
|---|---|
| Sales before discounts and refunds | 1 000 000 |
| Discounts funded by the cafe | 50 000 |
| Refunds to guests | 50 000 |
| Revenue after these adjustments | 900 000 |
| Food cost of selected orders | 300 000 |
| Packaging | 50 000 |
| Fictional commission of the hypothetical service | 200 000 |
| Fictional advertising expenses | 50 000 |
| Contribution after listed expenses | 300 000 |
Contribution calculation: 900 000 minus 300 000 minus 50 000 minus 200 000 minus 50 000 = 300 000 tenge. The food cost line in the example already covers prepared orders, including confirmed costs for refunds. You do not need to add their food costs again.
Suppose the hypothetical service transferred 650 000 tenge to the cafe: it deducted commission and advertising expenses from 900 000. All these terms are also fictional. The cafe pays for food ingredients and packaging separately. That is why the 650 000 payout and the 300 000 contribution answer different questions.
Check a similar chain in your own documents. If advertising is paid separately, do not look for its deduction in every payout. If a refund falls into the next settlement period, keep the link to the original order. Allocate overhead expenses after reconciling the direct calculation.
What decisions to make based on the calculation results
If the contribution is negative, reconstruct the order line items. Check the discount, packaging, recipe specifications, and contractual deductions. Fix accounting errors. If the negative result is confirmed, reconsider the specific promotion, the offer composition, or whether you can fulfill such orders under current conditions.
If the contribution is positive, evaluate the kitchen. Review order intake hours, queues, and dispatch delays. Extra delivery orders may require an additional staff shift or a different assembly setup. Coordinate the change with the manager and include the new expenses in the calculation for the next period.
Adjust the menu dish by dish. Compare contribution, demand, and packaging complexity. For dishes with frequent refunds, reconstruct the causes. When changing recipes, test the quality with the kitchen team. The approach to menu composition is described in the article on menu engineering.
Evaluate promotions separately. Record the period, funding, and expected guest action. After completion, compare contribution and order count with comparable days. Note any changes in operating hours, menu, and location availability so you do not attribute the entire outcome to advertising alone.
For advertising spanning the entire period, choose an allocation rule across orders. First show the total confirmed amount for the channel, then, if needed, the imputed share per order. You cannot determine which specific order resulted from advertising based on an allocated expense. Discuss marketing effectiveness separately from arithmetic cost allocation. When changing the rule, recalculate the comparison period or note the difference next to the total.
A hypothetical coffee shop might receive more delivery orders in the evening when fewer employees are on shift. Before expanding the channel, the manager should check shifts and fulfillment speed. A fair comparison of locations and hours is covered in the article on coffee shop analytics.
How to account for overhead and spare kitchen capacity
When deciding on an incremental order, check which expenses change during its fulfillment. If the current shift is sufficient, isolate food ingredients, packaging, and order-related expenses. If you need an extra employee or courier, include this change in a separate calculation for the planned volume. Record the initial conditions alongside the decision.
To evaluate a channel over a month, agree on overhead cost allocation. Discuss rent, payroll, and other overhead costs with the accountant and manager. Choose a clear allocation basis and show it separately from confirmed direct costs. An individual order's cost cannot be traced from an arbitrarily allocated amount. Keep the venue's overall total to verify that you accounted for each amount once.
Under heavy kitchen workload, compare kitchen workflow options. A delivery order can occupy the same station as dine-in dishes. Check available timestamps, shift staffing, and queues. Work with the manager to determine what work you can fulfill with current resources and what will change after expanding the channel.
If you are choosing between options, compare the same period under identical constraints. Record available kitchen time, required staffing, and confirmed cost breakdowns. After making changes, check actual workload and results. For the next decision, use verified figures while preserving the variance from the initial plan.
How to organize regular delivery reviews
Assign an owner to the calculation. The manager confirms orders and refund reasons, the accountant reconciles deductions and payouts, and the kitchen checks recipe cards and packaging. For missing information, record an inquiry with the vendor and set a temporary limit on the metric.
Review available sales, cancellations, and the queue of unmatched orders daily. Analyze contribution by channel and dish weekly. After closing settlements, finalize deductions and the overall result. Keep a change history if a late document modifies a prior week.
Display the cash register upload date and the period of the aggregator's latest settlement report on screen. Label the preliminary contribution clearly. It is essential for the owner to distinguish a decline in unit economics from a missing expense line. Screen examples are available in the article on restaurant dashboards.
Frequently asked questions
Is delivery margin the restaurant's profit?
In this article, it is the contribution after the listed direct expenses. For the venue's overall performance, you also need overhead expenses and agreed accounting rules. Label the formula next to the number and compare channels using identical definitions.
What Wolt or Glovo commission should you factor into the calculation?
Use the terms from your own contract and confirmed settlement documents. Commission and advertising expenses depend on the contract. The fictional amounts in the example are only for explaining the formula. Do not apply them to your restaurant.
Should you add the aggregator report to POS revenue?
First, check whether the order was recorded in the POS. If so, record the sale only once. Use the aggregator report to reconcile the channel, orders, and deductions. Analyze transactions that lack a POS link separately.
How do you account for a return if the dish has already been prepared?
Check the refund and what actually happened to the dish. Food cost may still remain after a sale cancellation. Record it according to your established procedure and ensure the amount is counted only once. Keep the link to the original order.
Can you compare Wolt, Glovo, Yandex Eats, and Chocofood in one report?
Yes, if you obtain comparable data and agree on definitions. Check available history, order statuses, discounts, and contractual deductions for each service. Map dishes and locations using a shared reference catalog, and show data gaps separately.
