The Delivery Metrics Every QSR Should Track Weekly

Delivery sales tell you what came in. They say nothing about what leaked out on the way: refunds, error charges, cancellations, and fees. Four numbers, reviewed weekly, give you the honest picture.

The four numbers

1. Error charge rate

Total error and refund deductions as a share of delivery sales, per platform and per location. This is your leak rate. Watch the trend, not any single week.

2. Dispute recovery rate

Of the charges you disputed, how much came back. A low recovery rate points at weak evidence or late filing. A recovery rate of zero usually means nobody is filing at all.

3. Cancellation and never-delivered rate

How often orders die after prep starts, and who absorbed the cost. Spikes here often trace to operational issues you can fix, like long ready times at peak.

4. Effective take-home per order

What actually lands after commissions, fees, and error charges. This is the number that should drive menu pricing and platform decisions, not the headline sales figure.

The fifteen-minute weekly review

• Pull the four numbers per platform and per location.
• Compare against the last four weeks, not just last week.
• Pick the single worst outlier and assign one action for it.
• Log recovery so wins stay visible to the team doing the work.

What good looks like

Not a specific benchmark. Every menu, market, and platform mix is different. Good looks like an error charge rate that trends down, a recovery rate that trends up, and no location left unexplained for more than a week.

If you want the recovery side of that scoreboard handled for you, Restaurant Logistics disputes and recovers across your platforms and reports the number back, on performance only.