Food Truck / Coffee Truck Startup Financial Model - Service Schedule Engine, 5-Year P&L, SDE & Payback

Description
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 per month x covers per service x ticket, with covers capped by your truck's covers-per-hour capacity.
• A Food to Coffee mode toggle: one switch reloads the whole economics (ticket, COGS, labor, capacity, CAPEX) from an editable preset, so the under-served coffee-truck case lives in the same file.
• City permit and 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 and a Year-1 monthly cash runway, so you see exactly which off-season months you bleed - the drain that sinks under-capitalised trucks.
• A 5-year P&L with EBITDA struck after owner pay, plus 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.

Every formula is machine-verified: the full calculation graph is recomputed by three independent engines (including Excel itself) before release, and both the schedule engine and the Food/Coffee toggle are stress-tested. It works in Excel and Google Sheets, with no macros or external links.

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