Cash Recovery answers the question that haunts a profitable operator: I made money on paper, so why is the account always tight? Profit is an opinion about a period. Cash is what is in the bank on Tuesday.

What it is for

A bar can be profitable and still run out of money. Profit and cash separate because of timing and because of stock: you pay for a keg in March and sell it in April, you pay staff weekly and get paid by card in batches, and a shelf full of product is money you have already spent that has not come back yet.

This section tracks where the gap is and what to do about it.

The same five rows as Profit

Cash Audit, Cash Playbook, Cash Fix, Cash Forecast and Experiments work as their Profit equivalents do. The rest of this page is what is different here, and one thing genuinely is.

Cash measures recovery differently, on purpose. Profit and Revenue score you against your own baseline weeks. Cash does not: its recovered figure is cash actually freed, read off your count history. Money that came off the shelf and back into the account is a real event with a date on it, so there is nothing to model.

The Cash Audit

A weekly score from 0 to 100 across the four things that decide whether a profitable bar runs flush or tight.

Where cash gets stuck

Trapped Cash

Working capital sitting on your shelf instead of in your account. Overstock, dead stock and product you will not turn over.

Two things about this figure are worth knowing, because both were deliberate decisions. It counts stock that has already settled rather than a truck that landed this morning, so a Thursday delivery for a weekend rush is not flagged as trapped. And it values what is on the shelf at what you actually paid, so a vendor raising a price does not move your trapped cash figure without a single bottle moving.

Capital Efficiency

Every dollar of inventory on your shelf is cash you spent that has not come back yet. This is how hard those dollars are working.

Purchasing

Over-ordering is the quiet way cash gets trapped. Not a dramatic loss, just a slow one, a case at a time.

Where you stand

Cash Position

The money in your account is not all yours to spend. This is a snapshot of how much actually is, right now. It is a current read and it deliberately does not follow a week selector: the question is what you can spend today, not what you could have spent in March.

Cash Bridge

The answer to the profit-versus-bank question, laid out. It walks from the profit you made to the cash you kept, and names what happened in between.

Cash Forecast

Thirteen weeks, a full quarter of money in against money out. Recurring bills, loan payments, tax remittances, payroll and the event money you are owed, week by week, so a tight week in nine weeks' time is something you can see coming rather than something that arrives.

What it feeds

• The Hub, where trapped cash and your position both surface.
• Break-Even, which reads your fixed costs and your reserve.
• The Bar Cop Audit, which scores cash integrity across the operation.

Where the numbers come from

Your counts, your closed weeks, and what you have logged in Books as money out. Trapped Cash needs counts. The forecast needs your recurring bills and outflows entered once. Cash Position needs both.

That is why this section is the quietest one in week one and often the most valuable by month three: it is the section that most depends on you having a history for it to read.

Every screen here has its own step-by-step directions in the app. Open the screen and tap the i in the top bar.