Payouts to couriers and delivery companies

Delivery is an industry with high contractor turnover, short shifts and a strong expectation of being paid the same day. One courier can complete a few dozen small orders in a month. Multiply that by two hundred couriers and you get a process that cannot be run by hand.

Here is how that process works in AKJET, step by step: from onboarding a courier to closing the month in accounting.

1. Onboarding at scale

The defining feature of delivery is that couriers have to be onboarded constantly and quickly. If sign-up takes several days and requires an office visit, some people drop out before their first shift.

What you need from a courier to start: IIN, phone number, first and last name. Nothing else at this stage.

• Sign-up without an office. The courier joins from their own phone; there is nowhere to go.
• Status is verified automatically. The platform checks that the person is eligible to work as self-employed — the delivery service does not deal with this.
• Onboarding in batches. If you are opening a new city and adding fifty couriers at once, they are submitted as a list rather than one at a time.
• Data processing consent. Signed electronically and kept as a document you can produce on request.

2. Contracts and acts

Delivery generates a lot of paperwork: a contract with every courier plus an act for every settlement period. With two hundred couriers that is hundreds of signatures a month, and collecting them on paper is not realistic.

So the whole document flow is electronic. The contract, the act and the personal data consent are signed online through eGov Mobile with a digital signature. Under Kazakh law an electronic document signed this way carries the same force as a paper one signed by hand.

Every payout produces a set: contract, act and e-Salyq receipt. That set substantiates the expense and preserves the corporate income tax deduction. More on the receipt in the e-Salyq receipt as a closing document.

3. Payouts

Getting paid on the day of the shift is what delivery services compete on when hiring couriers. Technically that means not one payout a month but hundreds of small payouts every day.

• As a register, not one by one. The payout list goes through as a single operation, whether it covers twenty couriers or two hundred.
• Checks before the money moves. Every line is verified for contractor status and type of activity.
• Tax withheld automatically. The 4% single payment is withheld and remitted by the platform; the delivery service does not calculate it.
• Money on the courier’s card. No payroll sheets, no cash, no trips to the office.
• Balance visible in advance. You can check the balance before launching a large register so payouts do not stall halfway.

More on the mechanics in bulk payouts to the self-employed.

4. Statuses

When there are hundreds of payouts a day, what matters is not the payout itself but knowing what happened to it. Every line in the register shows whether it went through, is waiting on the contractor, or ended in an error.

That changes how support works. Instead of “a courier says the money never arrived, let us go and investigate”, you get a register that points straight at the failing line and the reason. Fixing and retrying is targeted, without touching the other payouts.

For reconciliation, every payout carries your own internal identifier — an order, shift or accrual number. So the platform register and your system match line for line rather than roughly by total.

5. Integration

In delivery, payouts originate not in accounting but in the operations system: a shift closes, orders are counted, an accrual is created. It makes sense for everything downstream to start from the same place.

• Payouts from your system. The register reaches the platform automatically; dispatchers and accounting do not re-key anything.
• Test environment. A separate environment where the integration can be built and verified without touching real money or courier data.
• Exports back. Payout registers, documents and statuses feed into your accounting system for reconciliation and reporting.
• Under your brand. If couriers should see your app rather than someone else’s, White-Label is available.

What to prepare on your side and how the pilot runs is covered in the section for large companies and platforms.

6. Activity codes

The question people stumble over most: does courier delivery qualify for the self-employed regime? The key is not to confuse two separate lists.

The first list is the activities themselves. There are 40 of them, approved by Government Decree No. 994 and in force from 1 January 2026. Three matter for delivery:

The caveat on 53200 is the decisive one for delivery: courier work qualifies, while other postal activities are excluded from the list. Code 82990 is worth a look if you run a warehouse or dark stores: it covers picking and order assembly, sorting, packing, loading and unloading, and order handover. But it applies only to services provided through internet platforms.

The second list is the service codes used on the receipt. Within each activity, the specific service appears on the receipt under its own code. For delivery these are 44701 “courier delivery, excluding the delivery of postal items”, 44702 “other auxiliary services directly related to courier delivery provided through an internet platform” and 44801 “delivery of prepared food under contractual arrangements with the consumer”.

These five-digit codes come not from Decree No. 994 but from the service reference used to generate the receipt. Check both before you launch: the list of activities against the current version of Decree No. 994, and the service codes against the current version of the reference.

You can check a specific service in the activity reference, which searches the whole list as well as the service codes.

7. The tax side

What the platform closes out and what stays with the delivery service.

That last line matters. If a courier works to a schedule on an assigned route, follows internal rules and performs a permanent function, those are characteristics of employment, and since 8 June 2026 such a contract is directly prohibited by Article 26 of the Labour Code. The characteristics are set out in the ban on services contracts from 8 June 2026, and the formats are compared in self-employed, sole proprietor or a services contract.

Self-employment suits couriers who choose their own shifts and work for a result. It is not a way around labour law but a genuinely different kind of work.

8. Pilot

Nobody suggests moving the entire courier base at once. The sequence is:

1. Mapping the process. How many couriers, how often payouts run, how shifts are counted and what accounting needs.
2. Test environment. The integration is built and verified separately, with no real money involved.
3. End-to-end scenario. Courier, contract, act, receipt, payout and reconciliation — the whole path, but in test.
4. A limited group. Real payouts in one city or one shift: documents, tax and exports checked against live data.
5. Scale-up. We work out what stalled and why, then move the remaining volume.

The volume, timing and terms of the pilot are agreed separately — they depend on how many couriers you have and how your operations system is built.

Prepared on the basis of the Tax Code of Kazakhstan (Law No. 214-VIII of 18 July 2025, in force from 1 January 2026), the Labour Code of Kazakhstan and Government Decree No. 994 of 21 November 2025. Activity codes and their caveats follow the list approved by Decree No. 994; the five-digit service codes come from the service reference used to generate the receipt. Current as of August 2026. This is not legal or tax advice.