Food Truck / Coffee Truck Financial Model — Service Schedule Engine (Excel + Google Sheets)

Starting a food truck or a coffee truck? Every other template makes you type one "average sales per day" number and multiply. A truck cannot serve more than its window allows — so this model builds your revenue from a real service schedule instead.

Pick the slots you actually plan to work — lunch in a business district, an evening brewery shift, a weekend farmers market, catering, the occasional festival — and the model caps each one by your truck's physical service capacity (covers per hour). That ceiling is exactly what a flat daily average hides, and it is the number that decides whether your week is real.

What it builds for your truck:

• Revenue from a real service schedule — each slot = services/month × covers/service × ticket, with covers/service capped by your truck's covers-per-hour capacity. Change a slot and watch revenue, COGS and labor move.
• Food ⇄ Coffee mode toggle — one switch reloads the whole economics (ticket, COGS, labor, capacity, CAPEX) from an editable preset table, so the under-served coffee-truck case lives in the same file
• City permit + commissary rule — pick your city and the model loads its first-year permit (it varies ~30x between cities) and whether a commissary is legally required
• 12-month seasonality + a Year-1 cash runway — see exactly which off-season months you bleed, the drain that sinks under-capitalised trucks
• 5-year P&L, SDE and margin — EBITDA struck after owner pay, SDE added back for what you actually take home
• Payback, cash-on-cash, DSCR, breakeven and a 5-year IRR — the numbers an equipment lender or a clear-eyed buyer checks first

What's inside:

• 10-sheet Excel workbook (works in Google Sheets too — no macros, no add-ins, no external links)
• 18-page PDF user guide — quick start, sheet-by-sheet walkthrough, how the Service Schedule engine works, how a lender reads your DSCR, payback and breakeven, where to find your real numbers, and a full FAQ
• START HERE sheet: your first projection in minutes, only amber cells to fill
• Service Schedule sheet with five editable slots, capped by your truck's physical capacity
• Jurisdiction sheet with 6 city presets (permit + commissary rule) plus a Custom row
• Dashboard with KPI cards and a 5-year revenue-vs-SDE chart, formatted to share with a lender or partner
• Benchmarks sheet with sourced 2024-26 ticket, covers, COGS, labor, permit and startup ranges

Why this one: every formula is machine-verified — the full calculation graph is recomputed by three independent engines (including Excel itself) before release, and the schedule engine and the Food/Coffee toggle are both stress-tested. Models that balance to the cent.

Educational planning tool — not financial, legal, tax or investment advice. Permits, commissary rules, ticket prices and costs vary by city and over time; verify current rules with your local health department before relying on any number.