Books is where Bar Cop stops being an operations tool and starts producing documents somebody else reads: your bookkeeper, your accountant, a lender. It is the one section whose output leaves the building.

What it is for

Everything else in Bar Cop tells you how the bar is running. This tells you what it made, in a form an accountant recognises. Money out gets logged here, the weekly and monthly closes get built here, and the year rolls up here.

The six pages

Close Books

Your month-end close, worked top to bottom. Start here and it walks you through the rest rather than leaving you to remember the order.

All Money Out

The record of everything that left the bank: the bills that are not cost of goods or labor, plus the cash outflows that are not a cost of running the bar. One place, one drop.

Wages and salaries are not here. They live in Labor Control, and they reach your P&L from there. Logging payroll as an expense here would count it twice. The same goes for product: a delivery is cost of goods and it comes in through Inventory.

Break-Even

The one number that runs the business: the sales you need each week to cover your costs. It reads your real fixed costs from what you have logged rather than asking you to estimate them, and it splits your hourly labor from your salaried nut because only one of those moves with a busy week.

Weekly P&L Brief

Builds your weekly revenue, cost of goods and labor into an Excel file you can hand to a bookkeeper or open in QuickBooks, Xero or any spreadsheet.

Month-End Books

The month-end close: one Excel workbook plus a one-page owner summary PDF. The workbook is for whoever does your accounts, and the summary is the page you actually read.

Annual Review

The annual roll-up. Your full year in one place for tax season and for your own read on how the year went.

Where the numbers come from

Nothing in Books is typed twice. Every figure is assembled from what you already logged:

• Revenue from your confirmed weeks.
• Cost of goods from your inventory counts.
• Labor from Labor Control, hourly and salaried together.
• Everything else out from All Money Out.

That is why a month closes quickly if your weeks are closed, and why it is painful if they are not. Books is downstream of the weekly routine, not a substitute for it.

A month needs every week that ends in it confirmed. One unconfirmed week understates the month's revenue, so Close Books checks for it rather than quietly building a statement off four weeks of a five-week month.

What Bar Cop is not

Bar Cop is a software tool, not a CPA, accountant, tax preparer, payroll provider, attorney, or other professional advisor. Review and verify before filing, presenting, or making material decisions. That line is on every document it produces, because the document is the thing that travels to your accountant or your bank.

It does not file anything, calculate or withhold tax, or replace your accountant. What it does is hand them a clean set of numbers instead of a shoebox, which is usually where the money and the arguments go.

Where to start

All Money Out, once, with a month of statements. Break-Even cannot tell you anything until Bar Cop knows what your fixed costs actually are, and that one job turns on the number most operators say they want first.

Every page here has its own directions in the app. Tap the i in the top bar while you are on it.