Food truck software for pitches, pre-orders, POS and private hire

Ask a food truck owner where the hours go and the answer is rarely cooking. It is the work around it: answering where you are tomorrow, quoting for parties, counting stock, sorting out who works Saturday. Most of it happens after a long day on the pitch.

None of this needs a big system. It needs one place where the week lives, so that every other screen reads from it.

The board is the heart of it. Each row is a van or trailer, each column a day, and each slot a pitch: a lunch spot, a market, a festival, a private party. When you add a wedding on a Saturday that already has a market, the board shows the clash before you confirm, and suggests the van that is free.

From that board everything else follows. Your website and Google profile show the public pitches of the day. Private parties stay off the public page. The crew sees which van and which pitch they are on, with the start time and the address. If you also plan casual staff, the same board feeds staff scheduling software, so that nobody gets a shift on a van that is in the workshop.

Work a lot for festival organisers and wedding venues? Then the board also holds the documents each organiser asks for, so you are not searching your inbox the night before. Event businesses with the same problem at a larger scale will recognise it from software for event companies.

The lunch pitch makes or breaks the week. Office workers have half an hour. If the queue is twelve deep at 12:20, some of them buy a meal deal instead. Pre-orders fix part of that: a customer orders on their phone at ten, picks a collection slot, pays, and walks past the queue at 12:15. You see the orders per slot and cook in batches.

The till is the other half. Food truck POS software has to take cards quickly, work when the signal drops, and send each sale to the same stock and reports as your pre-orders. Many traders already use a card reader or a till app; we connect to what you have where we can, rather than replacing it. If you are comparing tills, our breakdown of Lightspeed pricing shows what a full hospitality POS costs per month.

A pre-order app for one van does not need to be a separate app in the store. A page on your own site that works like an app is often enough. When it does need to be a real app, with loyalty stamps or push messages, that is app development.

A food truck runs out at the worst moment: in the middle of a festival, an hour from the unit. Stock software for a truck is simple. It knows what is in the unit and in each van, what each pitch usually sells, and what is booked for private hire. On Thursday it tells you that the buns for Saturday will not stretch, while you can still order.

It also keeps the batch and the use-by date of what you prepare in the unit, which helps when an environmental health officer asks, and when a supplier recalls a product. The same logic sits behind inventory management software for shops and kitchens.

Allergens belong in the same place. Each dish carries the allergens of its ingredients, so the menu board, the pre-order page and the till all show the same thing. The rules for food made and packed on your own premises before it is ordered are in our guide to Natasha's Law.

Weddings, birthdays and staff parties pay the best per day, and they are won by the trader who replies first with a clear price. The enquiry often arrives at nine in the evening while you are cleaning down.

AI reads the enquiry from your form or email, fills in your menu, price per head, travel and minimum spend, and leaves a draft quote on your phone. If something is missing, such as whether there is power or flat ground for the van, it asks the customer. You check the price and press send. How this works in a wider hospitality business is on AI in hospitality; a tool that only drafts quotes is described under AI quote generator.

Caterers who cook for events without a van face the same quoting work, with more courses and more staff. If that is closer to your business, look at software for caterers.

People who want a van for a party search Google with the town in the query. First comes the map. That is your Google Business Profile, set up with a service area rather than a fixed address; see create a Google Business Profile, and after each event ask for a review as described in get more Google reviews.

Under the map come the websites. A page per kind of event and per area you cover does better than a home page with a slider. What belongs on such a site, from today's pitch to the hire form, is on food truck website design. If you want someone to keep your local ranking moving, that is local SEO. We build websites from 1,500 euro.

Software does not make you compliant, but it can hold the dates, documents and settings the rules ask for. These are the ones a UK food truck meets most often.

The full steps to get licensed are in our guide on the food van licence in the UK; the registration itself is covered in register a food business.

A sole trader does not need a fleet system, and a fleet does not run well on a single trader's tools. We start with what costs you the most hours now. If your setup does not fit a product off the shelf, custom software is built around the way your vans already run.

Take a trader with three weekly lunch pitches and a season of private hire. Assume 30 customers a week walk away from a long queue. With pre-orders and collection slots, say half of them come back. At an assumed margin of £6 per meal, that is £90 a week, or £3,600 over a 40-week season.

Now the quotes. Assume four private hire enquiries a week over that season.

The hours matter less than the speed: a quote that goes out the same evening wins more parties than one that goes out two days later. Run your own figures through the margin calculator and the break-even calculator.

For No.4 Lange Ast we built an availability calendar fed by the Airbnb and Booking iCal feeds, with a request form in four languages; see No.4. Want to talk about your vans? Start with a conversation through contact.