Your Wolt payout is not your turnover

A restaurant on Wolt sees one number more often than any other: the payout. It lands in the bank account, it is round enough to feel final, and on a busy month it is the only figure anybody looks at before the books are closed. It is also the wrong figure to start from.

The payout is the end of a short chain. A customer paid for food, the platform kept its commission, VAT was charged on that commission, and what remained was sent to you. Each link in that chain is a separate fact for the books, and the one that most often goes missing is the first: what the customer actually paid.

Who sold what

Start with the contract, because the answer to every other question hangs on it. Wolt’s Marketplace Product Addendum for Finland is plain about it: “The Merchant sells the Merchant’s Products to Users.”¹ You are the seller of the food. Wolt is not buying it from you and selling it on; it is selling you a service, which is putting your menu in front of its customers and taking the payment.

Verohallinto’s guidance on intermediaries says what follows from that, in the version in force since 1.1.2026. When an intermediary acts in the name and on behalf of the principal, “the principal who supplies the goods or services pays VAT on its sales to the customer”, and “the intermediary pays VAT only on the fee it receives from the principal.”² Two sales, then. Yours, to the customer, for the full price. And Wolt’s, to you, for the commission.

There are two sales in every Wolt order. Only one of them is yours, and it is the bigger one.

The arithmetic, one order at a time

The addendum also says how the commission is calculated, and the detail matters. It is a percentage of the Price, which the contract defines as the price of the products “including applicable taxes or VAT”, after any discount you funded yourself. And it adds: “VAT is also charged on Commissions.”¹

The rate on that commission is not the food rate. The same Verohallinto guidance is explicit that the general rate applies to an intermediary’s fee even when the goods it helped to sell carry a reduced rate.² Food is 13,5 %; the commission on selling it is 25,5 %.³

What booking the payout does to the books

The shortcut is to take the 686,25 EUR that arrived and book it as sales at 13,5 %. It looks harmless, since the money is right. Everything around the money is wrong.

• Turnover is understated by 276,43 EUR. The books show 604,63 EUR of sales against a true 881,06 EUR. That is more than a quarter of everything sold through the platform, missing from the turnover every month the shortcut is used.
• VAT is overpaid by 26,43 EUR. The shortcut pays 81,62 EUR of output VAT. Done properly, it is 118,94 EUR of output VAT less 63,75 EUR of deductible input VAT: 55,19 EUR. The commission is taxed at 25,5 % and the food at 13,5 %, so folding one into the other costs you the difference.
• The commission disappears as a cost. 250,00 EUR of expense, the largest single cost of selling through the platform, is nowhere in the profit and loss account, and nobody can see what the channel actually costs.

The Accounting Act has a name for the shortcut and forbids it. Among the general principles in chapter 3, section 3 is “the presentation of assets and liabilities on the balance sheet and the profit and loss account to their full amount without setting them off, unless the set-off is necessary for the purposes of giving a true and fair view (prohibition on netting).”⁴ The same section asks the books to follow “the substance of the transactions and not merely their legal form”, and in substance you made a sale and bought a service.

Vero already sees both halves

This used to be a question between you and your accountant. Since 2023 it is also a question Vero can answer without asking you. Under the EU rules known as DAC7, a platform operator reports its sellers to the tax administration once a year, by the end of January for the year before.⁵ Wolt confirms it is in scope and reports the merchants selling through it.⁶

What is reported is exactly the chain above, split in two. The “consideration”, defined as what is paid or credited to you “net of any fees, commissions or taxes withheld or charged”, and, separately, “all the fees, commissions and taxes withheld or charged” by the platform. Both are reported for each quarter.⁵ Add the two together and Vero has your gross sales through the platform, quarter by quarter.

So the payout-as-sales shortcut does not just misstate the books. It produces a turnover figure that is lower than one Vero already holds, by an amount that is easy to explain and awkward to explain after the fact. The reporting threshold for sellers of goods is 30 sales or 2 000 EUR in a year, which a restaurant on a delivery platform passes in its first week.⁵

Booking it: gross in, costs out, a clearing account between

The clean way keeps the three facts apart and lets one account catch the difference. Most bookkeeping systems call it a clearing or receivable account for the platform. It is what Wolt owes you at any moment, and after each payout it should come back to zero.

The order and timing matter less than the separation. A payout that covers two weeks straddling a month end simply leaves a balance on the receivable at the end of the month, which is correct: at that moment Wolt did owe you money.

The document that carries the deduction

The 63,75 EUR of input VAT is only yours if you hold a document that meets the invoice requirements. Verohallinto’s condition for deducting VAT on a purchase is an invoice with the contents the VAT Act lists: the seller, the buyer, the date, the service, the VAT base and the VAT by rate.⁷

The addendum says that Wolt sends its reports electronically and that it may issue self-billed invoices for one narrow case, reimbursements for its own errors.¹ It does not say which document serves as the invoice for the commission, and we will not guess. Find out which one it is in your merchant account, check it carries the VAT on the commission as its own figure, and file it with the payout it belongs to. That is the voucher for the second entry above.

There is a clock on this too. The contract gives you two weeks from receiving a report or a payout to tell Wolt about errors in either.¹ A monthly reconciliation finds a mistake too late to raise it. A reconciliation done when each payout arrives does not.

Four checks, each payout

• Sales in the books equal the total customers paid in the platform’s report, not the payout.Gross, after the discounts you funded.
• The commission equals your agreed percentage times that total, with 25,5 % VAT on top.Recalculate it once. A wrong rate repeats on every order.
• The platform receivable is back to zero after the payout, or the balance is explained.Within the two weeks the contract gives you.
• In January, the four quarterly figures the platform reports about you add up to your own year.Consideration plus fees equals your gross sales through the platform.

What this means for software

Bank import made bookkeeping faster by making the bank statement the starting point. For platform sales that is precisely backwards. The bank line is the last fact in the chain, the only one that is already net, and a tool that turns it into a sale has quietly done the one thing the Accounting Act forbids.

The payout belongs against a receivable. The sale belongs to the report the platform produced, at the rate of what was sold. The commission belongs to its own document, at its own rate. Any system that keeps those three apart will agree with Vero in January, and any system that merges them will not, however good its reading of the bank statement.