Food truck bookkeeping has a different rhythm than a storefront restaurant. You're moving locations, handling cash alongside card swipes, paying a commissary for kitchen space, and juggling permits across however many cities you serve. None of that is complicated on its own, but if you don't track it daily, it turns into a mess by month-end.
The trucks that stay profitable are the ones that know their real numbers by location and by day, not just a lump sum deposited at the end of the week. Here's how to set that up.
Why daily tracking matters more for food trucks
A restaurant with one location can get away with weekly reconciliation because the sales pattern is steady. A food truck can't, because revenue swings hard based on where you parked and what the weather did. If you only look at your bank deposit once a week, you lose the ability to see which locations and events are actually worth your time.
Daily sales tracking means logging gross sales, card fees, and cash separately for each day, ideally tagged to the location or event. Over a month this builds a picture: the Tuesday office-park lunch route might clear $400 in profit after gas and commissary allocation, while the Saturday festival gig clears $1,200. Without the daily breakdown, both just look like 'sales' and you can't tell where to put your energy.
This also protects you at tax time. The IRS expects gross receipts, and if your only record is a bank balance, you're reconstructing months of activity from memory when you get a notice. Daily entries, even rough ones, hold up far better.
Recording cash sales correctly
Cash is still common at food trucks, and it needs its own line in your books, not a blended estimate. The cleanest method: count cash at the end of each shift, record it as a cash sale for that day, and make a bank deposit (or note it as owner cash kept on hand) that ties back to the count. If deposits don't match the logged cash sales, you'll know immediately rather than six months later.
Card and app sales come in through your POS processor, usually in a batch a day or two later, net of processing fees. Those fees need to be recorded as an expense, not just netted out of revenue, or your gross sales figure will understate what you actually sold. This matters if you ever want a loan or need accurate numbers for a buyer.
A simple daily sales log — date, location, gross card sales, processing fee, cash sales, total — takes two minutes to fill out and saves hours of guesswork later. Many truck owners do this on a phone note or a shared spreadsheet before they lock up for the night.
Commissary fees and how to categorize them
Commissary kitchen fees are usually a fixed or usage-based monthly charge for storage, prep space, and sometimes parking. These should be recorded as a distinct expense category, separate from rent on any brick-and-mortar space you might also have. Lumping it into 'rent' or 'other' makes it hard to see your true cost of operating.
If your commissary fee includes utilities, trash, or pest control bundled in, you don't need to split those out further unless your agreement itemizes them separately. What matters is consistency month to month so you can compare the commissary cost against your sales volume and judge whether it's still the right setup as you grow.
Some commissaries charge extra for off-hours access or additional storage. Track those as they come in rather than averaging them, since they can spike in certain months and distort your expense trends if buried in a flat monthly number.
Permits, licenses, and multi-location complexity
Food trucks often carry permits across several cities or counties, plus health department permits, fire inspections, and parking permits for specific events. Each of these should be logged as a line item with its renewal date, not just expensed once and forgotten. A simple calendar tied to your books prevents the surprise of an expired permit showing up during a city inspection.
For tax purposes, permit and license fees are generally deductible business expenses, but keeping them in a single 'licenses and permits' category with notes on which jurisdiction each belongs to makes your return cleaner and makes it much easier to budget next year's renewals, especially if you're adding a new city to your route.
If you operate in multiple municipalities, some may have different sales tax rates or reporting requirements based on where the sale occurred, not just where your business is registered. That's another reason location-tagged sales logs matter — they let you sort out sales tax obligations by jurisdiction instead of scrambling at filing time.
Getting your books caught up and current
If your records right now are a mix of bank statements, POS reports, and handwritten cash counts that don't quite add up, you're not alone — it's one of the most common situations for truck owners who started the business to cook, not to do bookkeeping. The good news is it's fixable without redoing a year of work by hand.
EVO Bookkeeping charges a flat $199 a month: every account reconciled, every transaction categorized, with a P&L and Balance Sheet delivered by the second day of the following month. If you sign up, your backlog gets caught up free. If you just need a one-time catch-up without subscribing, that's $199 per month of backlog, done within two days, guaranteed in writing.
There's no contract, and you can cancel anytime. Get an instant quote on the site to see exactly what your situation would cost, and get your sales, commissary costs, and permits organized before the next filing deadline sneaks up on you.