Food truck / mobile / Accounting and back office
Accounting for a food truck
Scored and compared prices dated
The short answer
QuickBooks Online is the practical choice for a single truck, mostly because your accountant already knows it and a truck's books are simpler than a fixed site's: no rent line, no multi-course sales journal, but real mileage and vehicle costs that are worth tracking properly for the tax deduction.
Reviewed by the editorial team · updated 11 August 2026
Scorecard
QuickBooks Online
The generalist accounting package everyone's bookkeeper already knows, with nothing restaurant-specific built in.
The trade-off
August 2026 brought a 41% to 70% price rise on the Plus and Advanced tiers with nothing new added to justify it.
Why it won
- price
- ease of setup
- support
- volume
- integrations
Our scores, 1 to 5, defined on the methodology page.
What's different about buying this for food truck / mobiles
A truck's accounting is lighter than a restaurant's in some ways, no dining room lease, no big fixed overhead, and heavier in one specific way: vehicle costs, fuel, maintenance and mileage are a real, deductible expense that is easy to under-track if you are not logging it as you go.
QuickBooks Online's mileage tracker handles that part directly, logging trips automatically rather than relying on a driver's memory at tax time, which is worth more to a truck than to a fixed site. The Simple Start plan at $38/month covers a single truck's invoicing, expense tracking and basic reporting without paying for features built for a multi-site operation.
There is no restaurant-specific alternative worth recommending here; Restaurant365 is priced and built for multi-unit operators, not a single truck, and nothing in its feature set solves a problem QuickBooks does not already cover at a fraction of the cost.
Questions people actually ask
- Is mileage tracking worth setting up properly?
- Yes. It is one of the more overlooked deductions for a mobile business, and an automatic tracker catches trips a manual log tends to miss.
- Do I need a bookkeeper for a single truck?
- Not necessarily, but the first tax year is where mistakes are most expensive to make; even a few hours with an accountant to set up the chart of accounts correctly tends to pay for itself.