A deposit for $6,118.90 hits your bank account on the third of the month. It matches no invoice. It matches no order. You know it is real money for real food, but proving which orders it covers costs you an afternoon of spreadsheet archaeology, one highlighted cell at a time.

We talk to kitchens every week that close the month this way. The fix is not software first. It is order of operations. Here is the close we recommend, and it works even if you never leave the spreadsheet.

Start with completed orders

Pull every order you completed this month. Not quoted, not invoiced: completed. That list is your business volume, the number everything else must tie back to. Say it is 41 orders and $38,562.40.

Now split it in two:

• Card-paid orders, where cash arrives as processor payouts.
• Direct-billed orders, where you invoice the operator and wait.

Every reconciliation problem you have lives in the difference between those two lists.

Tie payouts to the statement

A Stripe payout is not an order. It is a batch: several orders grossed together, minus processing fees, deposited as one line. That $6,118.90 deposit is seven orders grossing $6,301.75, less $182.85 in fees.

Work payout by payout, not order by order. Match each deposit on the bank statement to the batch behind it, and confirm gross minus fees equals the deposit. When a payout will not tie, the culprit is almost always a refund or a dispute sitting inside the batch.

Direct-billed deserves its own line

Direct-billed orders hide because they produce no deposit. Nothing lands in the bank, so nothing prompts you to look. Keep them on a separate tab with an invoice date and an aging column, and chase anything past 30 days before you close.

This is also where fees receivable shows up. On a marketplace statement, that line is the platform fee on orders where no card payment ran, so there was no payout to deduct it from. It gets collected separately. Treat it as a real line with a real balance, not a mystery charge to investigate in March.

What done looks like

Done right, month-end is three checks:

1. Completed orders equal business volume, to the cent.
2. Payouts plus direct-billed collections equal cash in the bank.
3. The difference between the two is fees, itemized.

When all three hold, the deposit that used to eat an afternoon explains itself in one line. That is the standard we build to on the payments side at PlaneCater: your monthly statement arrives with the batching already undone and the fees already itemized. But the discipline works anywhere. Close in this order next month and watch how much of the archaeology disappears.