5 Apps You Should Be Using As A Food Trucker

It is easier to manage your food truck with a few well-chosen digital apps.

As a food truck owner in 2015, apps can take the stress out of managing and running your food truck. Today’s savvy food truck owner knows that owning a food truck is much more than good food in a good location – it requires specialized tools to help you manage inventory, take payment, track your spending and collaborate with staff.

According to a survey, of the 181 million smartphone users in the U.S., almost 79% will reach for their phones within 15 minutes of waking up. What are they reaching for? Email, games, movies and social media. It’s time to reach for something more productive. Reach for a mobile phone/tablet app to help you stay organized with your food truck business.

If you find the thought of using a mobile app stressful, we want to help by relieving some of that stress. In a small business study, 63% of respondents feel overwhelmed with the number of technologies available to run their business. You don’t have to be overwhelmed by your schedule or technology.

With so many to-do items on your daily list, it is easier to manage your food truck with a few well-chosen digital apps. (tweet this) In this blog post, we’ll discuss five easy apps you should be using as a food trucker.

1. Square for Food Trucks

With more than $50 million spent at food trucks with Square, you can count on the Square App to adequately process credit card payments at your truck.

You can take orders from your customers in line at your truck, online and at your truck window. With mobile payment tools and nearly immediate deposits to your bank account, Square simplifies your point of sale operations.

Easily added to any smartphone or tablet, your staff and employees will have easy access to payment processing. You can get a Square Reader for every team member – they are actually their own point of sale. This way, you can take multiple orders during the lunch hour and shorten your lines and wait time.

You can also set permissions and choose which staff members take orders or give refunds keeping your important business data confidential.

Using the Square app, your food truck benefits from a speedy check out process. With the online payment app, you can accept and process orders quickly. Handwritten tickets take longer, and the app speeds up the process.

How easy is the Square app? Just plug the Square Reader into your iOS or Android device, download the free Square Register app, and you can immediately start taking payments and collecting taxes and tips. You’ll also enjoy real-time analytics to help you focus on great food and serving your customers.

What happens if you don’t have Wi-Fi access? You can take swiped payments even when you’re offline.

Does the app only process credit cards? No. You can record cash payments, checks and even gift cards. This aids you in keeping your books and income accurate.

Online orders provide great customer service. You’ll never lose a customer to a long line again. Let your customers place their orders online from an embedded menu on your website. Customers can place their orders while at a different location or even while waiting in line at your food truck by using their smartphones. You can then have their food ready for them when they get to your truck or your window.

Your customer’s online order pops up in your Register app. All you have to do is accept the order, set a pickup time, and have the order ready for your customer.

Manage your inventory with Square. Set up your custom menu items for every dish. Not only will it make your line go faster, but you can update menu items and prices immediately in your dashboard. This also helps you manage your inventory and accounting.

2. Truckily for Food Trucks

The food truck app, Truckily, makes it easy to share and update your location with your customers. All it takes is one-click from your iPhone or Android smartphone. You can also update Facebook, Twitter and Foursquare instantly with your Truckily app. They’ll also put your food truck on a map so diners can find you easily.

With Truckily, you can update your location immediately and even schedule your route weeks in advance. Even if you change your location at the last minute, Truckily updates their map as well as your Facebook, Twitter and Foursquare accounts. Truckily saves you an immense amount of time.

Not only is Truckily your social media hub, but they can also send push notifications to your fans when your truck is nearby their location. Your diners will appreciate the heads up reminder.

Additionally, Truckily lets you schedule locations as far out as a whole year. This app helps keep your customers informed all year long.

Mobile apps increase your productivity and simplify your accounting.

3. Google Apps: Google Drive

Google Drive lets you save electronic files in the cloud and access them from any device. This means that your documents, spreadsheets, etc. aren’t stored on one computer, but they are stored on a secure Internet server. You can access them from your phone, your tablet, and your desktop or laptop computer.

As a food truck owner, you’ll find there are some documents you’d like to have easy access to. Since you don’t have a brick and mortar location, and it’s hard to fit a filing cabinet in your truck, you can have a “virtual filing cabinet” in Google Drive.

Google Drive also incorporates Google Docs, so you’ll have access to your business-productivity documents through Word, Excel and PowerPoint.

Items you might store in the cloud on Google Drive include:

Tax Id
Merchant Account Info
Billing Statements
Invoices
Spreadsheets
Marketing Files
Website Materials
Photos

4. Wunderlist

The life of a food trucker is a busy one. Wunderlist to the rescue. This innovative app is a simple to-do list management application. You can manage a multitude of schedules and tasks synced on all of your devices.

Wunderlist allows you to add items to your to-do list, add subtasks, recurring tasks and set reminders. Don’t have time to go to the Farmer’s Market? Share your shopping list with a staff member. You can also manage your staff through this app.

Add Wunderlist to your phone, tablet, and computer, and watch your productivity soar. (tweet this)

5. Google App: Google Voice

The office for your food truck is probably a desk at home, and you most likely don’t want to use your cell phone or home phone for business calls. The Google Voice app makes it easy to set up a phone number for your food truck.

With Google Voice, you’ll keep your personal number off your website, and you won’t have to purchase a costly, physical landline. In fact, Google Voice is free!

Following are some of the benefits of using the Google Voice app:

You can have a local number.
You can record calls and store them.
You can keep personal and business contacts separate.
Voicemails are automatically transcribed and emailed to you.
You can use your cellphone with two different numbers. With Google Voice, you can either answer calls on your computer or set up call forwarding so your current phone receives a call to your Google Voice number.

These are just five of the apps you’ll find useful as a food trucker. If you’ve found another app you like, please share it below. We’d love to hear about it.

Images: Blake Patterson and Larry

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