Food Truck Expense Spreadsheet: Profit Per Event

Quick Answer: A food truck expense spreadsheet works best when every cost is tagged either to a specific event (food, event fee, fuel to get there, staff for that shift) or to the month (commissary rent, insurance, truck payment, permits). Subtract event costs from each event's sales to see which stops are worth booking, then subtract the monthly overhead for the true profit. Fill it from your bank, card and processor statements, and keep a mileage log for the vehicle.

A food truck lives or dies by its calendar. The Tuesday brewery stop, the Saturday farmers market and the private wedding all have different sales, fees and food costs, and a plain monthly expense list hides which ones make money. This spreadsheet answers that question per event, then rolls everything up by month for the books.

Start with the question: which events pay?

Here is the end result, so the setup makes sense. One row per event, from a typical week:

The festival had the biggest sales, but the private party earned almost as much on less than half the revenue, with no fee and no card cost (the client paid by bank transfer). The office park barely covers its share of overhead. That is the kind of decision this sheet exists to support.

The two tabs you need

Events tab. One row per stop or booking: date, event name, location, type (recurring stop, festival, catering, private), hours open, and gross sales from your point-of-sale report for that shift. Add a Miles column for the round trip from the commissary.

Costs tab. One row per payment: date, payee, amount, category, and an Event column. Fill Event when the cost belongs to one booking; leave it as MONTHLY when it is overhead. Then on the Events tab, each cost column is a SUMIFS against the Costs tab on event name and category, and Event profit is sales minus those columns.

Insert a PivotTable from the Events tab (Insert > PivotTable, per Microsoft's steps) with Type in rows and Sum of Event profit and Sum of Hours in values. Divide one by the other and you have profit per hour by kind of event, which is usually more useful than profit per event.

Food truck cost categories

Event-level costs (tag to the event):

• Food and packaging. If you shop per event, tag each receipt. If you buy weekly for several stops, split by each event's share of sales; it is an estimate, but a consistent one.
• Event or booking fees, including a percentage of sales some festivals take after the fact.
• Shift labor from your schedule.
• Fuel and generator propane. Truck fuel by miles driven to that event; propane by hours run.
• Card processing fees. From the processor's payout report, which lists fees per day.
• Event-specific permits, such as a temporary health permit for one festival.

Monthly overhead (tag MONTHLY):

• Commissary kitchen rent and parking
• Truck loan or lease payment, insurance (vehicle and liability)
• Annual health permit, business license and fire inspection, spread across twelve months
• POS and online ordering subscriptions, phone
• Repairs and maintenance on the truck and kitchen equipment
• Marketing, wraps, website
• Bookkeeping and professional fees

Filling it from statements

The point-of-sale system has your sales; your bank and card statements have nearly every cost. Once a week:

1. Download the business checking and card statements, or wait for the month-end PDFs. If you only get PDFs, QuickBankConvert converts them into dated rows you can paste straight into the Costs tab.
2. Delete transfers between your own accounts and owner draws.
3. Code each line with a category, then assign the event. Most rows are obvious from date and payee: a fuel stop on festival morning, a market fee charged the day before.
4. Reconcile processor payouts: gross sales from the POS minus fees and refunds should equal each deposit on the bank statement.

Cash purchases (ice from a gas station, a cash-only produce stand) will not be on any statement. Photograph the receipt and add a row by hand the same day. For the general technique of coding statement lines, see tracking business expenses from bank statements.

What vehicle records does the IRS expect?

The truck is the asset most likely to raise questions at tax time. IRS Publication 463 says your records should show when you traveled, where you went, why (the business purpose) and how far you drove. The Events tab's Miles column, with date and location, already is most of that log; add trips that are not events (supply runs, the repair shop) as their own rows.

You generally choose between the standard mileage rate and actual vehicle expenses. The IRS standard mileage rates page, checked on October 27, 2026, lists 72.5 cents a mile for January 1 to June 30, 2026, and 76 cents from July 1 to December 31, 2026, for business use. Rates change, so check the page for the year you are filing. Publication 463 also lists situations where the standard rate is not allowed, so a large converted truck with heavy actual costs is a question for your tax preparer before you pick a method. Either way, keep the fuel and repair rows coded; they are needed for the actual-cost method and useful for the business regardless. The mileage log habits in mileage deduction and bank statement tracking apply directly.

The monthly summary

At month end, one small table:

Overhead per event day is the hurdle: an event whose profit is below it is costing you money once the truck payment and commissary rent are counted. In the example week, if overhead works out to $410 per operating day, the office park lunch at $334 is a loser, and the brewery stop clears it by $110.

Planning for slow months

Most trucks have a season. Overhead keeps arriving in January whether or not there are markets, so once you have a year of rows, add a column to the monthly summary for operating days and look at overhead per event day across the year. In a cold-climate city it may triple in winter. Two uses for that number: it tells you how much cash to set aside from the busy months to cover the quiet ones, and it shows whether a few winter catering jobs are worth chasing even at thin margins, because each one spreads the fixed costs over another day. Some owners also pause the commissary or insurance coverage in the off-season; if you do, the spreadsheet will show exactly how much that saved.

How is this different from a trucking or restaurant sheet?

A freight owner-operator's trucking expenses spreadsheet is organized around loads, per-mile costs and fuel tax; there is no food cost or event fee. A restaurant expenses spreadsheet tracks prime cost against daily sales at a fixed location with rent as a large fixed line. A food truck sits between them: restaurant-style food and labor percentages, with a vehicle and a calendar that changes every week.