Free. No card, no plan.
A food truck POS system that fits in your hand
Take the order at the window on a phone you already own, send it to the person cooking two feet behind you, and call the number when it is up. It is a point of sale for food trucks with no till to bolt down, no floor plan to invent, and no card processor to sign with.
No card needed. Nothing to install.
What a food truck POS has to do that a restaurant POS does not
A truck is a kitchen with a queue attached and about four square feet of counter. There is no host stand, no floor plan, no back office and usually no spare outlet, and the person taking the order is often the person handing it out forty seconds later. A restaurant POS is designed around a room: tables, sections, a station per area, and a bill that stays open while people sit. Almost none of that survives the move to a truck. What is left is the part that actually matters at a lunch stop — the order, the modification somebody shouted at the window, what is cooking, what is up, and who has paid — and the hardware it runs on has to be something you can carry between the commissary and the pitch without a trolley. The other thing a truck has that a dining room does not is a connection that changes with the address, which is the first thing to settle and the subject of its own section below.
The queue is standing in front of you the whole time
A truck has no seat numbers and nothing to write a ticket against, so every order is an anonymous one in a line of anonymous ones — and the line can see how long it is taking. What goes wrong is not the taco, it is the "no onions" on the second one, the order that has been sitting ready for four minutes because nobody knew whose it was, and the two people who both think they are next. Platevio gives every order a short number your window can read out, and each physical unit inside it moves through ordered, preparing, ready and served on its own. So the person cooking and the person at the hatch work off one record rather than two memories — what one of them changes is on the other’s screen without either of them reloading — and both can answer the only two questions a queue ever asks: is mine started, and is mine up?
What Platevio gives a food truck
Six things, all of them about a service with no counter to put anything on.
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It runs on the phone already in your apron
A phone, a tablet or a laptop with a current browser, and a connection. That is the whole hardware list. Nothing is bolted down, nothing is proprietary, and adding a second screen for whoever is cooking costs whatever the device costs, because it is a web address rather than another station bought from us. Every device reads the same service off one server, and each change reaches the rest without anybody touching them.
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An order that never asks which table
Leave the table off and the order stands on its own. Platevio can run a floor plan for the venues that have one, but a truck is not made to invent a dining room before it can sell lunch.
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Every order carries a number you can call
Each one gets a short, human number of its own — the counter runs per restaurant, so it stays short — and it is on the order everywhere it is drawn. That is what the hatch calls out, and what the person cooking answers to.
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Extras and the note ride with the food
"No onions." "Extra sauce." "Sauce on the side, it is for a kid." A priced extra and a free-text note both sit on the one unit they are about, so the change made at the window is attached to that unit when it reaches the person cooking, rather than shouted across the truck.
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Two of the same thing move separately
Every physical unit has its own state, so one of the three tacos can be ready while the other two are still on. Mark one ready too early and you can walk it back down to preparing, and a unit cancelled by mistake can be put back on the ladder, instead of starting a second order to fix the first.
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The card reader you already chose
Record what settled each item — cash, card, cheque, meal voucher or a method you named yourself — while the card itself goes through the reader you picked for your ticket size. No percentage of it comes to us, because we are not your processor. It is also not one tap: the payment happens on your device and is recorded here.
One order, window to hand-off
A lunch stop at half twelve, with eleven people in line and two of you in the truck.
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12:31
The order is taken at the window
Three tacos, one of them with no onions, and a drink. No table chosen, so it stands on its own. Sent, and it comes back as order 47.
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12:32
The cook picks it up on the other device
One service, on the tablet by the flat top as soon as the window sends it rather than kept in a copy of its own. Every unit arrives with its extras and its note attached, and the tacos start moving as they are made.
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12:35
The drink is up before the food
Each unit goes to ready by itself, so the hatch can see that two of the three tacos are still on and does not call 47 a minute early.
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12:36
“Forty-seven!”
The number is on the order wherever it is drawn, so whoever is at the hatch calls it without asking who ordered what.
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12:37
It is paid for and it is off the board
The card goes through your own reader; Platevio records that it was settled and how. Then the finished order is hidden by hand, and the board is back to the ten people still waiting.
Connectivity: decide this before anything else
Platevio does not work offline, and for a truck that is the question that decides everything else. Orders move through a server, so the devices need a working connection for the whole service — a phone hotspot or the venue’s wifi will do it, but it is still a dependency, and it is a dependency at exactly the addresses trucks trade at. There is no queue of orders waiting to sync when the signal comes back, and there is no offline card capture either, because Platevio never touches the card at all. Every food truck buyer guide treats offline service as the defining requirement, and they are right to: a POS that stops at the festival pitch is worse than a notepad. So test the actual signal at the actual stop, at the hour you actually trade. If it holds, everything on this page holds with it. If your route has known dead zones, buy an offline-first system and come back to us when we have one.
Where Platevio fits, and where it runs out
It fits a single truck, trailer, stall or pop-up that trades somewhere with a reliable connection, wants to run the service on devices it already owns, and would rather keep its own card reader than sign a processing contract. It is not an all-in-one truck platform, and these are the things it does not do today. None of them are on a promised date, so weigh them as they are.
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Every order is labeled Dine-in
An order genuinely does not need a table, which is what a truck needs. But takeaway is not yet a kind of order Platevio creates, so the board prints Dine-in on all of them. It costs you nothing operationally and it will look wrong to you every day until we fix it.
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Nothing customer-facing
The number and the live status are for your team, on your devices. There is no screen a queue can watch and no text message when an order is up.
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Online pre-orders and the delivery apps
Orders are taken by your crew, at your window. There is no ordering page, no pre-order for a pitch you have not reached yet, and no connection to the delivery platforms.
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Inventory, and a sold-out switch
Platevio counts nothing. When you run out of something you remove or rename it on the menu, which does not disturb the price already stored on the orders that bought it — but there is no button that greys it out for the rest of the stop.
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Printed receipts and kitchen tickets
Thermal printing is being built and is not usable yet. Today the order lives on screens, and a customer who wants a printed receipt is asking for something Platevio cannot hand them.
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One truck at a time
A second truck is a second restaurant with its own menu and its own board, and moving between them means signing out and back in. A fleet wanting one view across every truck does not have it here.
How to choose a POS for a food truck
Test it in the truck, not at a desk — on the smallest screen you will actually carry, in the glare, with the mobile signal you really have. Take a modified order, change an item after it was sent, find which order is up next, and take a payment, all while somebody times you. The best POS for a food truck is the one that still works at your worst pitch, not the one that demos best at a desk. Then ask the questions that decide what it costs and what happens when the pitch goes quiet.
- Do orders keep working when both the wifi and the cellular data disappear?
- Are offline card payments guaranteed by the vendor, or taken later at your risk?
- What has to be plugged in, and how much counter does it need?
- Is the software tied to one payment processor?
- Can the menu change from stop to stop without rewriting the orders already taken?
- Can the crew tell which order is up without a second tool?
- What does another device, another pitch or a second truck cost?
Food truck POS questions
- Do food trucks need a POS system?
- Not strictly — plenty of trucks run on a notepad and a card reader. What a POS buys you is that the order, the modification, what is cooking and what has been paid for are one record instead of four places, which starts to matter at the volume where somebody is always asking whose order is next. Below that, the honest answer is that a notepad is fine. Most food truck software sold today bundles that record with card processing, inventory and a customer app; Platevio is the record on its own, and you keep the rest of your choices.
- Can I use my phone as a food truck POS?
- Yes. Platevio runs in a current browser on the phone, tablet or laptop you already own, and a second device is a second browser tab rather than another station to buy. Cards are still taken on a separate reader or terminal, because Platevio does not process them.
- Is Platevio a food truck cash register?
- No, and the difference is worth knowing before you buy. A cash register is a drawer and a printer: it holds the money and prints the slip. Platevio holds the order — the items, the extras chosen on each one, the note, what is cooking and how each unit was settled — and it holds none of the money. There is no drawer for it to open, no receipt for it to print, because thermal printing is being built and is not usable yet, and no till reading to take at the end of the night. Keep the cash box and the card reader you already have. What Platevio replaces is the notepad, not the register.
- Does Platevio work offline at festivals?
- No. Platevio needs a working connection for the whole service, and there is no store-and-forward queue that catches up when the signal returns. A hotspot or the site’s wifi counts, but test it at the pitch, at the hour you trade. If the signal is genuinely unreliable there, choose an offline-first system.
- Does Platevio take food truck card payments?
- No. Take the card on the reader you already have, then record in Platevio how the order was settled. That keeps you free to choose a processor on your own ticket size, and it means no percentage of your sales comes to us — but it also means paying is not a single tap inside one app.
- Can it run without a table map?
- Yes. An order does not need a table, so a truck never has to build a floor plan to sell anything. One caveat in the other direction: takeaway is not yet its own kind of order, so the board still labels every one of them Dine-in.
- Can customers see when their order is ready?
- Not from Platevio. Each order carries a short number and every item shows its live status, but that is a staff-side view — there is no customer-facing pickup screen and no automatic text message. What the number is for is calling it out of the hatch.
- Can I run more than one truck on it?
- Each truck would be its own restaurant, with its own menu, its own staff and its own board, and switching between them today means signing out and signing back in. That works for one truck and is genuinely awkward for a fleet, so a multi-truck operator should count that cost before committing.
- How much does a food truck POS system cost?
- Count more than the software: the compact hardware, the card processing, the cellular data the whole thing depends on, and whatever is charged per extra device or per location. Platevio is free to use, runs on devices you already own, and takes no percentage of your sales — and your payment provider stays a separate bill with a workflow of its own.
Open your restaurant tonight
It takes a minute: your restaurant, your first menu, and you are taking orders.