Best Food Truck POS Systems of 2024

The free version of Square for Restaurants has mobile POS options and includes a free magstripe card reader. This limits your costs to only the related processing fees of a card transaction. Additional tools, such as team management, customer directory, online checkout and a virtual terminal, are also available in the free plan. Read our full Square for Restaurants POS review.

• Orders: Square for Restaurants POS allows you to customize your menus from anywhere and take orders with QR codes.

• Payments: Square serves as your payment processor with its POS system. You can accept credit and debit cards, cash, checks and gift cards — both online and offline.

• Inventory: Square POS allows you to manage and track your inventory from anywhere. You can edit items, update quantities, receive low stock alerts and import or export inventory items.

• Dashboard: The Square Dashboard gives you the ability to manage your back-office operations in one place, with tools for inventory, managing customer profiles and viewing sales data.

• Team management: Set employee permissions, track employee time and optimize labor costs and staffing with employee reports and analytics.

• Directory: This free feature lets you add customer profiles with contact information, view purchase history and save credit cards on file.

• Analytics: Real-time analytics and sales reporting — giving you the ability to track sales, compare data based on timeframes and see what customers spend and return — at no additional cost.

• Square tools: In addition to the third-party integration options Square offers in its marketplace, you can also buy add-on tools such as Square payroll, marketing and customer loyalty.

• Support: Square provides customer assistance for its free plan Monday to Friday from 6 a.m. to 6 p.m. If you upgrade to the Plus plan, you’ll have support 24/7. Help articles, videos and FAQ are also offered.

Toast's POS system is designed for restaurants even to the point of including hardware that can withstand spills and heat. Its free plan is a low-cost option for food truck businesses that are just starting out. Read our full Toast POS review.

• Menu management: This cloud-based system lets you access and update your menus from any device and manage availability of menu items.

• Inventory management: This add-on lets you monitor inventory, determine recipe costs, schedule recurring orders and send orders directly to your suppliers.

• Payments: Toast handles credit and debit card processing in-house, but doesn’t provide rates. Instead, processing rates are quote-based for each business.

• Reporting and analytics: The system lets access key reports and sales performance through a cloud-based system. You can view net sales, labor costs and monitor performance over a set period of time.

• Training: Toast has online lessons, videos and articles that can be used for training, plus live Toast classroom sessions and a test mode that can be used to become familiar with the system.

• Add-ons: For an additional fee, you can get features such as mobile ordering with QR code scanning capabilities, scheduling and team communication, marketing, customer loyalty programs and gift cards.

Clover’s impressive mobile hardware options can run on cellular data plans. Plus, its free customer engagement tools make it a strong choice as a mobile POS system for food trucks. Read our full Clover POS review.

• Menus: The POS system lets you create menu items, select categories and add color-coding to help with order accuracy.

• Ordering: The system accepts all major payment types including contactless and allows you to preset tip amounts.

• Inventory management: To keep inventory current, you can assign categories, labels, modifiers and variants.

• Team performance: The system lets you manage schedules and timesheets, set permissions and run reports to see how employees are performing.

• Analytics: You can track sales from any computer or mobile device and filter reports to show your busiest times and best-selling items.

SpotOn’s monthly software fee and payment processing fees along with its ability to integrate with third-party hardware make this system an affordable and appealing option. It also offers customizable add-on features such as a loyalty program and team management software. The company also has a strong reputation for its hands-on approach to customer support, from installation and training to 24/7 availability for assistance.

• Menu management: SpotOn lets you add and edit items on your restaurant's menu screen. You can also import menu items.

• Payment processing: Credit card processing fees decrease as you level up from a free to paid plan and, in addition to cards, you can accept Google Pay, Apple Pay, Venmo and PayPal.

• Table layout: Select from a variety of table types and add new tables to your dining room as needed.

• Reporting: You can generate reports on daily sales, hourly sales, payroll, profit and more.

• 24/7 support: Representatives are available around the clock by phone and email.

• Review management tools: SpotOn aggregates online reviews about your restaurant so you can read and respond to them all from one place.