SMBDashboardFood Truck Daily Numbers: A 4-Minute Close-Out
By Mark Fulton · 2026-09-21 · 12 min read
Food truck sales tracking that actually changes decisions happens at the end of every service, not the end of the month, because a truck's economics change by pitch. Close each service with four money lines written against the location: sales (card total plus counted cash minus your float), food cost (items sold times their plate cost, plus anything binned), fuel (truck and generator), and the pitch fee. Add one time line: total hours, including prep and travel. Sales minus the three costs, divided by the hours, gives profit per hour for that pitch. It takes about four minutes with a phone, needs no POS integration, and after roughly eight services at a pitch you know whether it deserves a place in next month's schedule.
Why does a food truck need daily rather than monthly numbers?
A restaurant has one address, so its monthly profit and loss describes one business. A food truck with the same menu at a Saturday farmers market and a Wednesday office park is running two different businesses that happen to share a kitchen. The customers are different, the ticket size is different, the fee is different, the drive is different, and the hours you give up to be there are very different.
A monthly total blends all of that into one figure. If March was a good month, you cannot tell whether it was good because of the brewery Thursdays or in spite of them. The month hides the one decision that is fully in your control: where you park.
The pitch is also the decision you make most often. Markets, breweries, office parks and events all want an answer weeks ahead, and cities that allocate public spots tend to do it by site and shift. Boston's public food truck lottery, for example, awards numbered sites with fixed lunch, dinner and late-night shifts, and when we checked in September 2026 one late-night summer site listed a daily rate of $100. Every one of those sites is a separate bet with its own cost. Your records should be kept the same way.
So the unit of record is the service: one location, one shift, one set of numbers.
What four lines close out a service?
Four money lines and one time line. That is the whole close-out.
- Sales. Your card processor's app shows the day's card total. Count the cash drawer and subtract the float you started with. Card plus cash is sales. If you sell through an ordering app as well, add its total for the shift.
- Food cost. Items sold times what each one costs you to plate, plus whatever you threw away. The next section covers how to get this without a stocktake.
- Fuel. The truck's drive to and from the pitch, plus the generator. Most operators forget this line completely, because the fuel receipt arrives on a different day from the service it paid for.
- Pitch fee. Stall fee, event fee, permit day rate, or the percentage an event takes from your sales. Zero is a valid entry, and worth writing down, because free pitches are usually the ones that look better than they are.
The time line is hours, counted from the moment you start prep to the moment the truck is clean. This is the second line most operators forget. A four-hour lunch service that needs three hours of commissary prep and ninety minutes of driving and setup is not a four-hour job.
If you pay a helper for the shift, their wage for that shift is a fifth money line. Processing fees can be logged once a month from the processor's statement instead of per service; they scale with sales and rarely change the ranking between pitches.
The legal side of this is ordinary recordkeeping. The IRS guide for new businesses, Publication 583 on starting a business and keeping records, lists cash register tapes, deposit slips, receipt books and credit card charge slips as documents that support gross receipts, and it even walks through a daily summary of cash receipts. The close-out is a daily summary with the location attached. For anything that touches your tax return, your bookkeeper or accountant is the right person to ask; this post covers the operating numbers only.
How do you cost food per service without stocktaking?
A full stocktake after every service is not realistic in a truck. You do not need one. You need two things you probably already have.
A plate cost for each menu item. Work out once what goes into each item and what it costs at your current supplier prices: the protein, the tortillas or bread, the sauce, the garnish, the container, the napkin. Write it on a card. Update it when a supplier invoice changes a price you care about.
A count of items sold. If your card app records items, use its item report. If it only records totals, keep a tally sheet by the window and mark each item as it goes out. A tally is faster than it sounds when there are six items on the board.
Items sold times plate cost gives you the food cost for the service. Then add waste: whatever was prepped for this service and binned at the end. That is the line that separates a good pitch from a busy one, because a pitch where demand is unpredictable forces you to over-prep, and the bin is where you pay for it.
This is a calculated food cost, not a measured one. It will drift from reality if portions creep or a supplier raises a price you did not update. Once a month, compare the total of your service-level food costs with the total of your supplier invoices. If the invoices run consistently higher, the gap is portioning, waste you did not write down, or a stale plate cost. That monthly check keeps the daily figure honest.
A worked close-out: one service, four minutes
Illustration only. The truck, prices and quantities below are invented to show the arithmetic. They are not data, benchmarks or typical results.
A two-person taco truck works a Saturday farmers market from 10:00 to 14:00. The menu board has three items. Plate costs come from the owner's recipe cards.
| Item | Price | Plate cost | Sold | Sales | Food cost |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Taco plate | $12.00 | $3.60 | 70 | $840.00 | $252.00 |
| Rice bowl | $14.00 | $4.20 | 36 | $504.00 | $151.20 |
| Drink | $3.00 | $0.60 | 36 | $108.00 | $21.60 |
| Total | $1,452.00 | $424.80 |
Here is the four-minute close-out, in the order it actually happens in the truck:
| Step | Time | What you do | Result |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | 60 sec | Count the drawer: $462 counted, $150 float | Cash sales $312 |
| 2 | 30 sec | Read the card app's total for the shift | Card sales $1,140 |
| 3 | 60 sec | Tally sheet times plate costs, plus 8 bowls' worth of rice and protein binned (8 × $4.20 = $33.60) | Food cost $458.40 |
| 4 | 60 sec | Fuel receipt ($44 truck, $14 generator), stall fee from the market's invoice, helper's wage | Fuel $58, fee $75, crew $132 |
| 5 | 30 sec | Write down hours: 3.5 prep, 2 travel and setup, 4 service, 1 close and clean | 10.5 hours |
Now the pitch's result:
- Sales: $1,452.00
- Food cost: $458.40 (31.6% of sales)
- Fuel: $58.00
- Pitch fee: $75.00
- Crew: $132.00
- Profit before fixed costs: $728.60
- Per hour of the owner's day: $728.60 ÷ 10.5 = $69.39
The same truck works a Wednesday office park, solo, from 11:00 to 13:30, still in the illustration. Sales $780, food cost $246, fuel $22, permit day fee $40, no crew. Hours: 2 prep, 1.5 travel and setup, 2.5 service, 0.5 close. Profit before fixed costs is $472, over 6.5 hours, which is $72.62 an hour.
The market did nearly double the sales, and the office park paid slightly better for the owner's time. Without the fuel line and the hours line you would never see that. With only a sales column, the market looks like the obvious keeper and the office park looks like filler.
Notice what the figure is: profit before fixed costs. Truck payments, insurance, commissary rent and licences do not change with where you park, so they do not belong in a comparison between pitches. They belong in your break-even figure, which tells you how many good services a month you need. The break-even walkthrough for service businesses does that arithmetic step by step, and it works the same way with services in place of jobs.
How do you compare pitches fairly?
Compare profit per hour, not sales. Sales rewards long days and expensive fees. Profit per hour rewards the pitch that pays you best for the day you give up to be there, which is the scarce thing a truck owner has.
Three rules keep the comparison honest.
Compare like with like. A Saturday market against a Saturday brewery is a fair fight. A Saturday market against a Tuesday office park is mostly measuring the day of the week. When you rank pitches, group them by the day and shift they compete for.
Write down the weather and anything unusual. One word in the note field ("rain", "street fair next door", "ran out of bowls at 12:40") saves you from dropping a good pitch because of one bad Saturday. Selling out early deserves a note too, because it means the sales figure understates the pitch.
Use the same hours rule every time. If prep counts at one pitch, it counts at all of them. The absolute figure matters less than the consistency.
What does a bad pitch look like in the numbers?
Bad pitches rarely look bad in the sales column. They show up in the other lines.
- The fee eats the day. An event with a large flat fee or a percentage of sales can post your best sales of the month and your worst profit per hour. Write the fee as a separate line so you see it every time.
- The drive is the hidden cost. A pitch forty minutes away costs fuel both ways and eats an hour and a half of your day. It has to outsell the pitch down the road by a wide margin just to break even with it.
- Waste is high and erratic. If one pitch keeps producing a full bin, demand there is unpredictable. You either over-prep and bin food, or under-prep and sell out while the line is still long. Both cost money; only one of them shows in the waste line, so keep an eye on the sold-out notes as well.
- Sales swing wildly from week to week. A steady middling pitch is often worth more to your cash flow than a spectacular one that alternates between great and empty.
How many services before the pattern is real?
One service tells you almost nothing. Weather, a nearby event, or a school holiday can double or halve a day, and a single result will mislead you in both directions.
A workable rule of thumb, not a statistical law: give a regular pitch about eight services before you judge it, and make sure at least a few of them fall on its normal day and shift. Then look at two things. First, whether the pitch's average profit per hour sits clearly above or below your other options. Second, whether adding the latest service still changes the ranking. When a new service stops moving the order, the pattern is probably real. If a pitch sits close to your others after eight visits, it is close; keep it on its merits, like how easy it is to work or whether it feeds your catering bookings, rather than on a small difference in the arithmetic.
For one-off events you will not get eight tries. Treat each as its own decision and judge it on the fee against the realistic sales, then write down the result so the next invitation from the same organiser gets a faster answer.
Where do the numbers live?
A notebook in the cab works, as long as it is always the same notebook. The failure mode is not bad arithmetic; it is close-outs scattered across receipts and phone notes, with nothing to add up at the end of the month.
If you would rather have them on one screen, open the money module in SMBDashboard and log each service as entries with the category set to the pitch name: one income entry for the sales, and expense entries for food cost, fuel, fee and crew, with a one-word note saying which line each one is. The entries list shows the category next to each line, so filtering to income lines up sales by pitch, and the expense breakdown shows which pitches cost the most this month. The weekly business report prints the week's revenue, expenses and profit against the week before, on one page.
To be straight about the fit: the free tier holds 200 money entries (plus 25 customers and unlimited tasks). At five lines a service, that is about forty services, so a truck working five days a week will fill it in roughly two months. Pro removes the cap and adds CSV export, which turns "profit per pitch" into a one-minute pivot in any spreadsheet. Your data stays in your browser unless you turn on Pro sync, which is off by default.
If you also run a fixed site, the six numbers a small restaurant can collect covers food cost, labour cost and prime cost for a single address.
Frequently asked questions
What food cost percentage should a food truck target?
The target is the one your menu prices were built on. If you priced the taco plate assuming the food costs you roughly a third of the price, that is your line, and the close-out tells you each service whether you held it. Widely quoted industry bands circulate without a disclosed sample or method, and they flatten real differences between a coffee truck and a barbecue trailer. Your own figure from the last month is the benchmark that was definitely measured on your truck. If it rises, check portioning, waste and supplier prices before you touch the menu.
How do I compare one pitch to another?
Divide each service's profit before fixed costs (sales minus food, fuel, fee and crew) by the total hours it took, prep and travel included. Compare pitches that compete for the same day and shift, and judge on several services rather than one.
Do I need a POS to track food truck sales?
No. You need a card total, a counted drawer, and either an item report or a tally sheet. A POS with item reporting makes the food cost step faster, and many trucks already take cards through an app that shows the shift total. None of that has to connect to anything else. Four lines written down after every service will tell you more than a dashboard full of metrics you never look at.
How do I account for prep time?
Count it in the hours line for the service it was prepped for. If one commissary session preps for two services, split the hours between them in proportion to what went on the truck for each. The rule matters less than applying it the same way every time, so that pitch-to-pitch comparisons stay fair.