This takes you from a fresh account to your first closed week. Four steps, and you do not have to finish all of them before Bar Cop starts telling you something useful.

What Bar Cop does

Your POS rings the sales. Bar Cop runs everything that decides whether those sales made you money: inventory, labor, shift cash, profit, revenue, cash, events and your books. You put your numbers in once a week. Bar Cop scores your operation, prices every leak in real dollars, and tells you what to work on first.

Set up in four steps

Your Hub shows these four the first time you sign in, and ticks each one off as you finish it. Work them in order. Each one takes about as long as it sounds.

1. Count your bar. Add your vendors and products, set your pars, then take one count. Straight away you get what to reorder and the cash sitting on your shelves.
2. Add your people. Add your positions first, then your staff on top of them.

   Do this even if your POS exports hours. An hours report only lands for people already on your roster. Bar Cop will not invent a person from a timeclock file, because a name it guessed at once is a duplicate you have to clean up later. Positions and staff first, then the import works.

3. Add your registers. Optional. Only worth doing if you reconcile drawers in Bar Cop every shift. Skip it and you lose nothing: drop a drawer report at step 4 and Bar Cop offers to set each register up from the names in your own file, spelling and all.
4. Close your first week. Drop your POS reports for the week, or type each piece in by hand. Every piece shows you both doors, so you never have to guess which way is supported.

You do not have to finish all four before Bar Cop is worth opening. One count and one closed week already gives you a real pour cost, your cost of goods, and your first audit score.

What closing the week actually is

It is one page and six rows. Sales and Hours are the two that matter most. Tips, Cash over and short, and Catering are there if you use them. Cost of goods is not something you type at all: it comes off the count you already took.

• Sales and Hours are what every other number is built on.
• Tips, Cash over and short and Catering are optional.
• Cost of goods works itself out from your inventory count.

Finding your way around

The menu down the left side is the whole app, grouped the way you actually work:

• Week is your Monday sitting: Close, Review, History.
• Control is where your numbers go in: Inventory, Labor, Shift.
• Recovery is where Bar Cop hands them back as money: Profit, Revenue, Cash.
• Hub, Audits, Events and Books sit above it, and Settings below.

Help on every screen

The deepest help is inside the app, not here. On any screen, tap the i in the top bar and you get step-by-step directions for exactly the page you are looking at. It ships with the app, so it is never describing an older version of a screen.

Where to go next

Once you are set up, work the section you spend the most time in. Every section has one guide here covering what it does, the weekly loop, and every screen inside it. If you run more than one bar, each one is its own subscription with its own books, and a switcher appears in the top bar once the second is added.