Tech or teamwork? Discover how smart POS choices can streamline restaurant operations
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Track your profits to grow your business. This customizable free template makes it easy to analyze your restaurant's financial performance.
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Streamline orders from diners, online orders, self-serve kiosk systems to kitchen without missing an order. Give your FOH staff an easy-to-use POS system and process orders quickly and efficiently.
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Give your customers the best service from order to pay. We provide secure payment options through cards, QR codes, and links. Our cash management system reduces the risk of theft or errors in cash handling.
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Access reports for sales, products, inventory and employee performance across multiple stores on one dashboard. Accelerate growth by easily identifying what needs to be fixed.
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Easily control inventory, out of stock updates, and menu pricing, image and description changes for multiple restaurants including online store on a single admin dashboard.
Biggest rule before you start a food truck business, you must know this fact: the city you choose is just as important as your recipes.
Pick a place with hungry crowds, food truck-friendly laws, and year-round foot traffic, and you’re set to thrive. Park in the wrong spot? You’ll be fighting for scraps and spending more time hunting for parking than making sales.
In this quick guide, you’ll get the Top 10 best US cities for food trucks. Let's go!
Ready to see where your wheels could take you? Let’s dig into the best cities, what makes each one promising, and what you need to be cautious about when you start a food truck business.
The Live Music Capital of the World isn’t just for guitar lovers.
Think SXSW crowds, ACL (Austin City Limits), and Pecan Street Festival. College students, hungry office workers, and festival-goers keep the lines steady. Legendary food truck spots like The Picnic, Rainey Street, and South Congress make it easier to find consistent foot traffic.
Check out food cart pods like Cartopia, Hawthorne Asylum, and the 5th Avenue Food Cart Pod–all magnets for the lunch crowd. Moreover, locals genuinely love supporting indie food businesses.
Just look at Lardo, Nong’s Khao Man Gai, and Kim Jong Grillin’. All started small and grew thanks to loyal neighborhood fans. Plus, your startup costs here can be lower than in giant cities like LA or NYC.
This craft beer capital has a booming brewery scene and young professional crowd. Breweries, summer fests like Denver Burger Battle, and markets like Denver Bazaar mean there’s always something happening outside. Young professionals and locals love eating outdoors. Perfect for your truck.
LA practically invented the modern food truck boom. Remember, Kogi BBQ?
A massive, diverse population plus film shoots and events like Downtown LA Art Walk and Venice First Fridays mean a big opportunity for bold, creative menus.
Having said that, competition is next-level here. Plus, parking can be a real headache thanks to strict street vending zones, limited curb space in busy areas like Silver Lake and Echo Park, and rules about staying a certain distance from brick-and-mortar restaurants. So, check the LA Street Vending Ordinance before you roll in.
Year-round sunshine and a massive tourist scene make San Diego a coastal haven for food trucks. Beachgoers at spots like Pacific Beach, Mission Beach, and the Embarcadero Marina Park keep foot traffic steady, along with college students and busy downtown workers.
But scoring prime coastal spots like La Jolla Shores or Coronado Beach can be tough. Why? Because competition is high and some areas fall under California Coastal Commission rules, which often require special permits. So, research carefully and lock in your locations early to stay ahead.
Music City is booming with tourists and has a great food truck scene, especially around outdoor concerts at places like Ascend Amphitheater, big downtown festivals, and events on Broadway or near Vanderbilt University.
Note that winters in Nashville can be chilly enough to keep people indoors. So, fewer crowds wandering up to your truck. Plus, the city’s buzz depends a lot on big concerts and festivals. So, some weekends will be packed. But others can feel slow if no shows are on.
This booming region is home to big universities like Duke, UNC Chapel Hill, and NC State, plus tech hubs like Research Triangle Park, Red Hat, and IBM. So, a steady stream of hungry students and office workers!
The community even hosts regular Food Truck Rodeos. These are big events where dozens of trucks gather in places like Durham Central Park for crowds to sample them all in one spot.
But spots near popular campuses like Franklin Street in Chapel Hill, Hillsborough Street by NC State, or downtown Durham can get fiercely competitive. Plus, some neighborhoods have strict parking rules, so always double-check local ordinances before you start. Plus, some areas have parking restrictions you’ll want to check before committing.
Houston’s population is huge and incredibly diverse. Doesn't this sound like a dream if you want to try unique global fusions? Of course, it does! The city’s brewery scene is also growing fast. Plus, big parking lots mean trucks can flourish if they build good partnerships.
Considering that Houston is sprawling, you may experience higher fuel costs and more time driving between prime spots. Without careful route planning, you could eat up your profits on gas alone.
Tech companies, wealthy professionals, and an adventurous foodie scene make Seattle a strong contender for a truck with gourmet options. There’s also a growing event catering market here.
It’s no secret: it rains a lot! Be ready for seasonal dips and research which parking zones have the best foot traffic. Also, some areas are pretty restrictive about where trucks can park, so do your homework.
Home to theme parks, conventions, and massive tourist traffic, Orlando offers you a huge seasonal crowd hungry for fun food options. Plus, the weather is food-truck-friendly most of the year.
But you may not find one single “daily” spot that works year-round. Many trucks here rely on catering gigs and festivals to hit their numbers. So, choose a flexible POS that makes it easy to handle both event catering orders and your daily menu management.
Whether you’re parking under Austin’s festival lights or rolling up to a Seattle tech campus, the winning combo is simple: right city + smart operations = a food truck that flourishes. Be prepared - check out this article on weather condition and food truck sales by Food Truck Nation CEO, Nadeem Battla.
The best food truck POS systems make all the difference when you’re juggling orders, loyal customers, mobile payments, and surprise rush hours.
OneHubPOS is built to help you do everything, from menu engineering to dynamic pricing and contactless payments that keep your line moving fast.
Ready to serve more and earn more? Book a OneHubPOS demo today and let’s get your food truck running profitably, wherever you park!
You’ve already poured your money, time, and probably your life savings into making your restaurant real. The last thing you want is to watch it all get eaten up by fines, surprise audits, or penalties… just because you didn’t set up your restaurant sales tax correctly.
Not to mention the trust you could lose if your customers spot mistakes on their checks.
In this blog, we’ll explore how to set up different sales taxes for your restaurants across the country—and manage them easily on a single cloud dashboard.
Restaurant sales tax is a small percentage your restaurant charges your customers on top of the cost of their meal when they order and pay. But you don’t keep this money. Every month or quarter, depending on where you are, you hand it over to the tax authorities.
But what if you go wrong with restaurant sales tax and don’t collect enough? Sadly, you’ll still owe the difference. Out of your pocket. Therefore, guessing isn’t an option if you want to stay compliant and keep your restaurant profitable.
So, is there sales tax on restaurant food in the U.S.? Well… yes. In restaurants, you almost always have to charge sales tax on food and drinks. Some states have different rules for alcohol or catering. But in most cases, if you’re handing someone prepared food, you’re collecting tax.
Sounds simple, right? Well… sort of. However, the real difficulty is how wildly the rates can change depending on where you operate. Unlike other countries with a single VAT or GST, the U.S. has no federal sales tax. Instead, the sales tax rate varies with the place. So, this difficulty becomes a pain point when you're not using a reliable POS system.
So when you open your café, diner, or burger joint, you can’t just Google “average sales tax” and put it on your receipts. You have to know your exact state rate, plus any local or special meal taxes that apply to you.
Miss it, and you could undercharge and owe thousands later or overcharge and end up refunding frustrated customers!
Here are some examples to understand how sales tax works in the U.S.:
Oregon, Montana, and New Hampshire don’t collect statewide sales tax at all. But local options can still pop up. For example, parts of Montana have local “resort” or “tourist” taxes up to 3%–5% on prepared food.
New Hampshire doesn’t have a general sales tax. But it does have a 9% Meals and Rentals Tax on restaurants, hotels, and catering.
In Virginia, the base state sales tax is about 4.3%. But cities can add a hefty meals tax, sometimes up to 7%. In Richmond, for example, the combined tax for restaurant meals can reach 11.5%.
In Rhode Island, the base sales tax is 7%. All restaurant meals and beverages carry an additional 1% local meals and beverage tax. That makes your total restaurant tax 8%.
The state tax in Illinois is 6.25% on general goods. But food and drinks for immediate consumption are taxed higher. Plus, cities like Chicago add on a local restaurant tax. The result? A Chicago restaurant often collects around 10.75%–11.75%.
New York City’s base sales tax is 4%. But it adds a local rate plus a Metropolitan Commuter Transportation District (MCTD) surcharge. So, a NYC café or bistro usually collects around 8.875% total.
When your restaurant sales tax rates change, your restaurant POS has to be flexible. You should be able to add, edit, or remove tax rates in seconds. No spreadsheet hacks. No manual calculators. The clean, clear tax settings should match your city’s rules so that you don’t wake up to an audit letter down the road.
OneHubPOS makes this part easy: it lets you stack state and local taxes, label them clearly, and tweak them. The whole process is quick, clear, and designed for non-techy folks.
Here’s exactly what you do:
Log in to OneHubPOS using your credentials: your username and password. Once you’re in, you’ll see your dashboard, with various types of quick reports and graphs. This is your command center for… well, everything from sales to staff. All in one spot.
If you're managing multiple restaurants from a single dashboard of your QSR POS, go to the topmost drop-down icon slightly to the left and click it. You'll see a menu with the names of the places you're managing. Click on the restaurant for which you want to set up the sales tax.
However, if you're not running many places or if your desired location is already chosen, no need to go through this step.
Click on the three-line icon to the left. You’ll see a menu with options like Dashboard, Reports, Employees, Menu, and Product Setup. Go all the way down. You’ll see Settings at the bottom. Click that. It’s where you manage restaurant tax rates, discounts, role-based access, and many more aspects of restaurant operations.
Inside your Settings, you'll see sections like Discount, Taxes, Modifiers, Tippings, Terminal, and so on. Click on Taxes to view your existing restaurant tax rates. If you’re just getting started, this list may be empty.
This is where you get to choose what you need to do:
Always double-check your entered restaurant sales tax rate. So, in case you've entered incorrect rates or if tax laws change, update your POS immediately. It’s way cheaper than paying back taxes + penalties later.
Maybe your area drops a local meals tax or some other tax.
So what actually happens at the counter once you’ve set up your sales tax? Here’s how it flows:
Ignoring tax paperwork is how a small mistake turns into a big, expensive problem. But now, you know:
So, restaurant sales tax isn’t scary when you’ve got the right system watching your back. OneHubPOS keeps it simple—with a clean dashboard, intuitive settings, and fast updates when your local tax rules change.
Ready to make restaurant sales tax one less thing to worry about? Book your OneHubPOS demo today and see how OneHubPOS helps restaurants like yours stay compliant, confident, and just focused on great service.
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Is your convenience store really convenient if your checkout crashes every time the internet hiccups?
A frozen checkout line can ruin your day—and your customer’s. You run a store built on speed. A dead payment terminal is the last thing you need.
That’s why having an offline POS system isn’t optional—it’s essential. It keeps sales moving, customers happy, and your store running, no matter what’s happening with your internet.
This blog explores what an offline POS system does for your convenience store and what the benefits are. Let's get into it.
A gallon of milk before breakfast? Late-night snack run? Emergency batteries when the power goes out? You have it all. Convenience – it’s right there in the name.
Your whole business revolves around making things easy and quick for the customer. You’re the pit stop where people know they can quickly grab what they need and keep moving.
That’s your edge. That’s what your customers love about you.
So, speed is much more than just your biggest selling point. It’s your reputation. It's your promise. But lose that speed, even for a few minutes, that promise of convenience goes out the window. Let it happen often enough, and you lose that reputation.
Even the slightest delay at checkout can have a ripple effect.
So, when your retail POS system works smoothly, you’re fast, frictionless, and convenient every time.
You probably don’t think much about your internet, until it goes down at the worst moment. What if that moment is when you’ve got a line out the door?
Is your c-store open 24/7 or at least well into late hours? If yes, suppose you're running a late-night shift. What would you do when your POS goes down and there’s no IT help at that hour? Your cashier would be stuck apologising while customers get annoyed. Manual workarounds? Nobody wants to write orders on paper at midnight.
Maybe you run a roadside store on the edge of town. A patchy signal is part of daily life. A lot of stores sit in places where getting a stable connection is tough:
One hiccup and you’re stuck.
Your store may have multiple registers, self-checkouts, tobacco counters, or lottery stations. Each checkout point needs to run independently. If one goes down because of an outage, that small bottleneck quickly turns into a line that tests everyone’s patience.
You’ve probably put real effort and money into making your store run smoothly. You’ve got:
All of that is great. But it can’t save you when your internet connection drops dead.
Think about it: if your network fails, it doesn’t matter how fast your scanner is. Your staff can’t process payments, your line keeps growing, and the frustration spreads.
That's when an offline POS system makes sure your efforts don’t get knocked offline when your internet does. You can keep working without the internet:
Furthermore, the POS stores your transaction data locally. All the sales data, customer info, or payment details are saved securely on the device (tablet, terminal, or server) instead of being sent immediately to the cloud.
When internet is restored, the cloud-based POS “syncs”:
So, a good offline POS mode works quietly behind the scenes:
No lost sales. No angry customers. No staff struggling to figure out handwritten receipts.
Here’s what an offline POS system really does for you:
Morning rush for breakfast and coffee? Afternoon snack runs? Friday nights when people stop in for drinks and last-minute party stuff?
These busy times are exactly when you cannot afford an outage. Offline mode makes sure that even if your connection cuts out, your lines don’t freeze up.
Customers won’t even notice something went wrong. They’re in, out, and on their way. Just how they like it!
When your system’s down, customers might stick around for a few minutes. But most people don’t have that kind of patience. They’ll abandon their basket, walk out, and you lose that sale.
But an offline POS system keeps the money coming in, no matter what your internet is doing.
Convenience store loyalty is built on trust.
When customers know they can rely on you for a quick stop every time, they’ll keep coming back.
One bad experience at checkout? People remember. But an offline POS system helps you avoid being “that store” with constant “system down” excuses.
When the POS freezes, your staff feels the heat immediately. They have to break the bad news to customers. They scramble for manual workarounds. That kind of stress? Unnecessary and avoidable.
But with offline mode, your cashiers can keep working like normal. No panic, no long lines, no awkward apologies.
Happy staff = happy customers.
Worried about losing all those offline transactions? The offline mode of the best retail POS system automatically saves everything locally.
When your internet’s back, the system updates your records without an issue. Consequently, your POS reports stay clean and accurate. So, you don’t have to spend hours fixing mistakes later.
Here’s a detail you might not have thought about:
If your store keeps running smoothly during an outage, but the gas station down the road has folks stuck waiting and wasted their time, who do you think those customers will choose next time?
Your store!
People notice who handles hiccups with no chaos. They’ll reward you with repeat visits. After all, you made their day just a little bit easier.
Once you've decided to go for an offline mode POS, you must ask the following questions from potential POS providers so that you get a system that works as per your needs:
At the end of the day, you know what makes a convenience store truly convenient:
Your POS keeps track of everything from daily sales to staff shifts and inventory. But none of that matters if your system comes to a halt the moment your Wi-Fi drops. OneHubPOS is built with the unique realities of convenience stores in mind: the odd hours, the patchy spots, the busy weekends.
Don’t let your POS system be your weakest link. Book a demo of OneHubPOS today to see how this offline POS system keeps your sales undisturbed and your customers smiling, even when your Wi-Fi has other plans.
