Food Truck Financial Model (Excel XLSX)

Starting your own food truck has its perks. Flexibility to set your own hours, low startup costs, mobility, branding, close interaction with customers, and creativity are all things that come along with this kind of business. It is not as capital intensive nor involve the overhead you see with starting a restaurant, but still allows for much of the benefits for a business owner that wants to deliver great food for customers.

Recently updated to include a 3-statement model and cap table. Starting up a food truck requires some financial planning, modeling, and assumptions about potential revenues, growth, and costs.

This is one of the only top-down models I have done. Technically it is a hybrid because of how revenue configurations are, but the expenses are nearly all top-down, meaning most of the expenses are defined as a percentage of revenue. The template goes out for up to 10 years and is annual-only.

The start year can easily be changed. For revenue, the user can define expected sales based on three periods (two growth periods and then a final stabilized period).

These assumptions let the user define the following in each period:

•  Avg. Daily Sales
•  Avg. $ Sale
•  Avg. Working Days per Month
•  Range of period (in years)

Variable Costs (percentage of total revenue) include:

•  Food
•  Labor
•  Other (gas/licenses/insurance/etc..)

There is a schedule of initial one-time startup costs such as:

•  Food Truck + Wrap & Equipment
•  Initial Product Inventory
•  Permits and Licenses
•  Website
•  Facebook / Twitter
•  Register / POS
•  Uniforms / T-Shirts
•  Paper Products (Plates / Napkins, etc.)
•  Misc. Expenses (Like a Chalk Menu)
•  Small wares: Pots, Pans, etc.
•  Fire Extinguisher

Part of the startup costs can be financed through traditional debt and the resulting debt service and remaining equity required populate accordingly.

A final return summary shows a cumulative cash flow and annual cash flow per period as well as the IRR, DCF Analysis and NPV, and ROI. In general this is one of the more simple templates to follow and should be intuitive for the average food truck startup.