A settlement cycle is the time between a customer paying you online and the money arriving in your bank account. It is written as T plus a number of working days: T+1 means the next working day after the transaction, T+2 the day after that. Payment gateways in India commonly settle on T+1 or T+2, some offer same-day or instant settlement for an extra charge, and delivery apps pay out on their own schedule, often weekly, after deducting commission. Settlements skip bank holidays and weekends, so a Friday evening's sales on T+2 reach you on Tuesday.
Why it matters
Food businesses pay for vegetables, milk and gas in cash daily and get paid for online orders days later. The gap is working capital you have to fund. A restaurant doing ₹20,000 a day online on T+2 permanently has about two days of sales, ₹40,000, sitting with the gateway, and a long weekend stretches that to four or five days. On a weekly aggregator payout the float is a full week of sales, and a dispute can hold it longer. Shorter cycles mean less of your money waiting elsewhere. The comparison in settlement cycles: T+1 vs T+2 works through the cash-flow effect.
Example
A cloud kitchen in Bengaluru collects ₹35,000 online on Saturday and ₹30,000 on Sunday. On a T+1 cycle, Saturday's money arrives Monday and Sunday's on Tuesday. On T+2 they land on Tuesday and Wednesday. If Monday is a bank holiday, everything shifts a day. The same weekend on a delivery app at 25 percent commission pays out roughly ₹48,750 the following week, so the kitchen is funding the weekend's ingredients from the previous week's receipts either way, but by Tuesday the direct channel has already paid. How a gateway's settlement is set up and what it charges is in Razorpay for restaurants: setup, fees and settlement.