The free food truck daily P&L template.

A food truck’s P&L is a per-service question

A restaurant asks whether the month paid. A food truck asks whether this pitch, today, paid — because tomorrow you might be twenty miles away in front of a different crowd. Fuel to get there, the pitch fee to stand there, the staff you brought, the stock you prepped: all of it lands on one service, and the honest question is whether that service cleared it.

This template is built around that. Each row is a service, tagged with where you parked. Fuel and pitch fees get their own line because for a truck they’re not overhead — they’re a direct cost of choosing that spot, and they’re exactly what a fixed-location P&L forgets to charge you.

The pitch note is the whole point

The single most valuable thing a food-truck owner can know is which pitches make money — and it’s almost impossible to feel accurately, because a busy-feeling service with a €40 pitch fee and an hour of diesel can lose to a quiet one round the corner for free. Memory won’t tell you; a month of tagged rows will.

So every day you note the location. After a few weeks, sort the sheet by EBIT and the pattern is undeniable: the markets worth booking, the office parks that only work on paydays, the festival that took a third of the gate in fees. That one column turns a month of hard days into a booking strategy for the next month.

How to use it (after you close the hatch)

Once: in Start here, set tax rate, card fee, your monthly fixed costs (truck finance, insurance, commissary kitchen, licences) and how many days a month you actually trade. Trucks trade fewer days than shops, so getting the day count right matters — it sets how much fixed cost each service carries.

Every service: enter takings cash and card, today’s food cost, staff paid, fuel and pitch fee, and the location. The sheet nets tax and card fees, subtracts costs and the day’s fixed slice, and shows whether the pitch paid — and the running month so a strong Saturday doesn’t hide three weak weekdays.

Working out whether a new pitch or a price is worth it? The free break-even calculator tells you the takings a service needs to clear before you commit to the spot.

Fewer trading days, so the number matters more

A truck that trades ten days a month can’t afford a blind one the way a seven-day café can. With fixed costs spread across fewer services, every dead pitch is expensive, and every good one has to carry more than its own weight. That’s exactly why a daily — really a per-service — profit number earns its place faster for a truck than almost any other business.

The spreadsheet does this well and costs nothing. When you’d rather log a service from your phone in the cab before you drive off — and keep the location history without maintaining the file — nouz runs the same per-service P&L. See it on sample data in the demo first; no account, no card.