Food truck and caterer bookkeeping: price the event, not the month

The event is the unit of account

We tag every job in QuickBooks Online — by event, and by line of business where you run more than one — so each gig produces a small P&L: sales, food cost from the prep sheet, staff hours, the festival pitch fee or venue commission, fuel and travel. Do that for a season and the pattern is blunt. Some festivals pay for their fees three times over; some corporate drop-offs are quietly your best margin; some beloved weekend markets never clear the cost of showing up. Monthly statements can't tell you that, because a strong catering weekend hides two money-losing street days in the same column.

Event tagging also solves the seasonality problem. A truck's July has to fund its February, and a P&L that shows the year as a rolling per-event ledger — rather than twelve disconnected months — is what makes winter cash planning something other than guesswork.

Catering deposits are not income yet

A deposit taken in March for an August wedding is a liability — unearned revenue — until you serve the event. Booking deposits as income when they land inflates the slow season, understates the busy one, and hands you a distorted picture exactly when you are deciding what the business can afford. GST/HST follows the same logic: under the Excise Tax Act, a true deposit is not consideration until it is applied against the invoice, so the tax point arrives with the event, not the e-transfer.

Our close keeps a simple schedule of booked events: deposit held, balance due, event date. Revenue moves out of the liability when the event happens, and a forfeited deposit from a cancellation gets its own treatment — it becomes income with HST inside it, and we book it that way rather than letting it sit in the liability forever.

Four kinds of revenue, four postings

That last row trips up more caterers than any other. A mandatory service charge on the contract is your revenue and carries HST. A voluntary tip a guest adds belongs to staff and flows through a tip liability instead. Mixing the two overstates or understates both your sales and your HST return, depending on which direction the error runs.

The commissary and the truck: the cost of showing up

Before a single taco sells, you are paying commissary kitchen rent, truck insurance, propane, fuel, maintenance, and parking or permit fees. We keep this fixed cost pool on its own section of the P&L and divide it across operating days, which gives you the one number every quote should start from: what it costs just to open the window. Food cost per event comes off the prep sheets; if an event can't cover its food, its labour, and its share of the pool, the books will say so in plain terms — before you book it again next year.

Cash controls that survive a festival weekend

Festivals are still cash businesses, and cash discipline is what protects both the money and the team. Each event starts with a counted float, each shift closes with a count against the POS, deposits go to the bank intact, and any cash paid out for ice or propane on the fly gets a receipt in the envelope. Card readers reconcile batch-by-batch to the bank. None of this is complicated — it just has to happen every time, and our monthly close checks that it did.

If your circuit crosses the border — US festivals, competition events, or catering gigs stateside — the tax file is thin but real, and we keep it honest on our food truck cross-border tax page. The full monthly close routine, from bank recs to HST filings, is laid out on our bookkeeping services page.