Selling food online for restaurants brings a lot of benefits, mainly in the form of incremental sales and profit, but it also comes with some complications. You need to account for different things, such as sales tax, and how these are collected. Online marketplaces such as DoorDash, UberEats, and Grubhub help you track sales tax on their platforms. However, each can be slightly different, making it harder for restaurants to track sales tax across the different marketplaces. That's why Fonda makes it easy.

What’s so complicated about online sales tax? 

State and local governments treat online sales tax differently based on how it’s collected and distributed. For example, as of this writing, DoorDash collects the sales tax from consumers on its site and then distributes it to restaurants, making it the responsibility of the restaurant to pay the sales tax to local authorities. UberEats, on the other hand, collects the sales tax from the consumer and also pays it out on behalf of the restaurant, making it so the restaurant doesn't need to pay it.

How Fonda helps track sales tax

Fonda acts as a middleware software provider. We help restaurants consolidate online orders into one tablet and also provide reports that allow restaurants to view all transactions in one place. Our goal is to simplify things for restaurants as they deal with one marketplace such as DoorDash, or with two or more.

How to get sales tax information from Fonda

If you are a restaurant using Fonda to streamline and improve your online sales, you can obtain historical sales tax data for all platforms via the Fonda dashboard.This is sales tax information you can  provide to your accountant or tax preparer.

Step 1. Log on to your Fonda dashboard

Log on to your Fonda dashboard, select custom date, and choose the desired date range next to “Transaction Report” (select up to a 6 month period. For a year, you will need to generate two reports)

Step 2. Download transaction report 

You can choose to download a report in CSV or Excel format, or email it to yourself.

Step 3. Look up relevant sales tax data in the report.

Once you open the report, you can easily see sales by transaction. You can see where the sales came from (e.g. UberEats, DoorDash) , how much tax was collected, and if the tax was paid on your behalf. In the example below, sales tax was collected by DoorDash and paid to you (you will need to pay this). In the case of UberEats, they collected the sales tax for you but then paid it out (you don’t need to pay it as it has already been paid).

Step 4. Do your own calculations

You can import your CSV to your favorite software or you can create pivot tables in Excel or Google Sheets to get a quick summary of what your restaurant was paid, how much sales was collected, and if the tax was paid on your behalf, for each marketplace.