What a food hall owes its vendors, and when

A vendor payout looks like one number and is actually four. Get the four right and nobody ever queries it. Get them right but present only the total, and you will spend an afternoon a month on the phone explaining it.

The four numbers

Takings. What that kitchen sold in the period, gross. Not what the card machine settled — settlement lands on a different day and includes other periods, and conflating the two is the single most common cause of a vendor and a hall disagreeing.

Commission. The hall's cut. Usually a percentage of takings, sometimes with a floor or a cap, occasionally different by channel because a delivery order costs the hall nothing in seats.

Recharges. The things the vendor consumed that the hall paid for. Wi-fi, waste, a share of the electricity, a packaging order, the deposit on a gas bottle. These are the lines that cause arguments, because they are the ones a vendor did not watch accumulate.

VAT. Commission and recharges are supplies from the hall to the vendor, and they carry VAT. The vendor needs that number separately or they cannot reclaim it, and a payout statement that shows only a net figure has quietly made your vendors' bookkeeping harder.

Why the invoice is the artefact, not the transfer

A bank transfer is a number and a date. It proves money moved. It does not prove the money was right, and six months later — at year end, in a dispute, when a vendor sells their business — the transfer tells nobody anything.

The document that matters is a VAT invoice showing the period, the takings it was calculated from, each charge as its own line with its own VAT treatment, the VAT summarised by rate, and the figure to pay at the bottom. That is the thing a vendor's accountant can work from and the thing that ends an argument.

One detail worth being fussy about: a debit should print as a negative, not as a positive in a separate column. An invoice that shows a charge as a positive number and expects the reader to know it comes off is an invoice people query. Print what the money does.

Freeze the numbers when you raise it

If your commission plan changes in October, last month's invoice must not silently recalculate. Store the totals on the payout when it is raised rather than deriving them live from the current plan. A statement that changes after it was issued is not a statement.

When to schedule it

Two constraints, and they are different. The first is your own balance: you can only pay out what has actually reached your account, and card settlement is not instant — commonly two banking days behind the sale. The second is the vendor's expectation, which is usually a fixed day.

The trap is scheduling a split payout — three instalments across a month, say — by checking only whether the last one clears. It will not tell you that the first one fails. The check has to walk the balance forward the way money actually moves: each payout out, each banking day of takings back in, in order. We got that wrong on the first pass and only caught it by running it against a real month of orders.

What we do and what we deliberately do not

HelchPOS records payouts: the arithmetic, the split, the VAT and the invoice, on one screen rather than as a charge and then a separate transfer. It does not move the money. No acquirer is connected and every payout payload says so — holding other businesses' money is a regulated activity and not one a POS should drift into by accident.

If you are building the same statement in a spreadsheet and it keeps disagreeing with your vendors, we would rather compare notes than send you a brochure.