Swiggy & Zomato reconciliation: GST, TDS and settlement accounting for restaurants (2026)

Suppose a customer places a ₹500 food order on Zomato. Here is what happens to the money before any of it reaches your bank account:

• GST on the food (5%) — collected from the customer by the platform and paid by the platform to the government under Section 9(5). It never touches your account.
• Platform commission — typically a fixed percentage of the order value, invoiced to you with 18% GST on top.
• Other charges — payment-gateway fees, ads and visibility programmes, packaging-material programmes, and customer-complaint or refund adjustments.
• TDS under Section 194-O — 0.1% of gross sales facilitated (1% before 1 October 2024), deducted against your PAN.

What lands in the bank is a net settlement, usually weekly. If you book that bank credit as “sales”, your revenue is understated, your commission expense is invisible, your TDS credit is lost, and your GST returns will not match your books. Every line above needs its own ledger. A POS that posts the full order — gross sales, commission, fees, TDS receivable — into real books at settlement, the way HelloBooks POS does, removes this entire class of manual work.

From 1 January 2022, restaurant services supplied through an e-commerce operator were notified under Section 9(5) of the CGST Act: the operator — Zomato, Swiggy, magicpin and others — is the person liable to pay the GST on those supplies, at 5%, in cash. The legal effect for you:

• You do not charge GST on aggregator orders and do not pay tax on them.
• The supply still belongs to you commercially — it is your turnover for income tax and for GST-registration aggregate-turnover purposes.
• GST TCS under Section 52 does not apply to these orders — the operator cannot both pay the tax and collect TCS on the same supply (CBIC Circular 167/23/2021-GST).

Dine-in, takeaway billed at the counter, and orders on your own website or direct WhatsApp remain your supplies in the normal way — you charge 5% and pay it yourself. A restaurant therefore runs two parallel GST streams, and the books must tag every order with its channel to keep them apart. This is exactly why channel should be a first-class dimension on every POS order, not a note in a spreadsheet.

The returns want the two streams in different places:

• GSTR-3B — aggregator (Section 9(5)) supplies go in Table 3.1.1(ii): taxable value only, no tax payable by you. The platform reports the same supplies in Table 3.1.1(i) and pays the tax. Your direct sales (dine-in, takeaway, own delivery) go in Table 3.1(a) as usual.
• GSTR-1 — supplies made through an e-commerce operator under Section 9(5) are reported in Table 14(operator-wise, with the operator’s GSTIN); the operator reports them in Table 15. These tables were introduced from the January 2024 tax period.

The classic error is reporting aggregator orders in Table 3.1(a) as well — which computes 5% tax you were never supposed to pay and creates a books-vs-returns gap that your auditor will chase at GSTR-9C time. For the full mechanics of GSTR-1, 3B and the annual return, see the Complete Guide to GST in India.

The platform’s commission invoice is a normal B2B supply of service to you, taxed at 18%. Whether that 18% is recoverable depends on your own GST position:

• Standalone restaurants at the concessional 5% rate — the 5% rate is conditioned on not taking input tax credit. The 18% GST on commission, ads, and platform fees is a pure cost. When you compute channel profitability, commission is effectively 1.18× the headline rate.
• Restaurants taxed at 18% with ITC (broadly, restaurants in specified premises such as hotels above the ₹7,500 room-value threshold) — the commission GST is creditable like any other input service.

Book the commission and its GST as separate ledger lines even when you cannot claim the credit — you want the GST-on-commission cost visible when you renegotiate rates or weigh moving volume to direct ordering. Menu pricing on aggregators should absorb this: many operators run a separate (higher) aggregator price list, which is another reason the POS needs per-channel pricing. See how HelloBooks Restaurant POS models channels, and what that means for food-cost math per channel.

Separately from GST, the Income Tax Act makes the platform deduct TDS on the gross amount of sales it facilitates, under Section 194-O — 0.1% with effect from 1 October 2024 (1% earlier). Individuals and HUFs with gross sales through the operator of up to ₹5 lakh in the financial year (and PAN furnished) are exempt.

• The deduction accrues against your PAN — verify it in Form 26AS / AIS quarterly.
• Book it as a TDS-receivable asset at each settlement, not as a fee expense.
• Claim the credit in your income-tax return; refunds arise if your final tax is lower.

If the platform’s TDS certificates and your ledger disagree, the settlement reports are the tie-breaker — which is one more reason to ingest them line by line. For the wider TDS system — rates, returns, Form 16A — see the Complete TDS Guide for SMBs.

A workable weekly routine, whether you run it by hand or let software do it:

1. Download the settlement/annexure report from the Zomato and Swiggy partner portals for the payout cycle — order-level gross value, commission, fees, adjustments, TDS.
2. Match order-level gross sales to the POS — every aggregator order in the report should exist in the POS with the same value and an aggregator channel tag. Investigate misses (cancelled orders, direct entries, missed punches).
3. Post the settlement journal — debit bank (net credit), commission expense, GST on commission, platform fees, refunds and TDS receivable; credit aggregator receivable at gross. The gross figure keeps revenue honest; the pieces keep costs visible.
4. Match the bank credit to the settlement UTR on the statement.
5. Monthly: tie channel-tagged sales to GSTR-3B Table 3.1.1(ii) and GSTR-1 Table 14; verify 194-O TDS against 26AS/AIS; and reconcile the aggregator receivable to zero (or to the open unsettled cycle).

In HelloBooks this journal is not a month-end project: every settled order already posted to the ledgers with its channel, so reconciliation is a match-and-confirm pass, not data entry. That is the practical difference between a billing POS and an accounting-native one — the case we make head-on in HelloBooks vs Petpooja.

• Booking net payouts as sales— understates turnover (income tax exposure) and hides commission costs (channel P&L looks better than it is).
• Double-reporting 9(5) supplies in Table 3.1(a)— pays 5% you did not owe; the mismatch against the operator’s reporting shows up in reconciliation.
• Claiming ITC on commission while billing at 5% — a direct breach of the concessional-rate condition; expect a notice.
• Ignoring 194-O credits — small per-cycle amounts that add up to real money left unclaimed in 26AS.
• No channel tag on orders — makes every one of the above unfixable after the fact, because you can no longer split direct from aggregator turnover reliably.