Labor Control is where the other half of prime cost lives. It plans the week, records what was actually worked, and hands a clean summary to whoever runs your payroll.

Bar Cop is not payroll software and does not try to be. It does not cut checks, calculate or withhold tax, or file anything, and it is not your official timekeeping record. It works out what labor cost you and hands you a worksheet. Overtime eligibility, exempt and non-exempt classification, tip credit and withholding stay with you and your payroll provider.

What it is for

Labor is the cost you can actually move during the week. Product cost is mostly set by your recipes and your vendors; hours are decided every time you build a schedule. Bar Cop tracks planned against actual so the gap is visible while you can still do something about it.

The weekly loop

1. Build the schedule for next week, and check Overtime Watch before you post it.
2. Run the week. Log call-outs and time off as they happen.
3. Log hours at the close, from your timeclock export or by hand.
4. Log tips if you track them, per person or as a pool.
5. Close the pay period and export it for payroll.

What it feeds

• Labor % and prime cost, the two numbers that say whether the week paid.
• Revenue per labor hour, on Week in Review and Week History.
• The Profit Audit, which scores labor discipline.
• Break-even, which splits your hourly labor from your salaried nut.

Set these up once

Add Positions

The job roles you schedule and pay: bartender, server, line cook. Positions come before people, because a staff member is built on one.

Staff Roster

Your team: every staff member, their position, wage and status. The roster holds name, position, pay type, wage, status, hire date, phone, email and notes. It never holds a social security number or bank details, deliberately.

An hours import cannot create people. A name in a timeclock file that is not on your roster is reported rather than added, because inventing staff from an export once produced duplicates that fixed nothing. Build the roster first and the import lands.

Training

Tracks that each person actually completed their onboarding, with a record you can show.

Planning the week

Build Schedule

A weekly grid: your staff down the left, the seven days across the top. It costs the week as you build it, so you see what the plan is worth before anyone works it.

Overtime Watch

Looks ahead at a week and flags who is heading into overtime before it happens, while there is still time to adjust. Salaried staff are skipped.

Time Off Log

Requested and planned absences before they happen: a day off someone asked for, vacation, a medical leave.

Schedule History

Every schedule you post lands here with its labor cost, labor percent and revenue per labor hour, so you can see how each week was staffed and what it cost.

Recording the week

Log Hours

Where actual hours worked get recorded. Drop a timeclock export or enter them by hand. Bar Cop never auto-deducts a meal break: hours are what you entered.

Call-Out Log

Attendance exceptions: no-shows, sick calls, late arrivals, early-outs. Reliability patterns surface instead of living in your head.

Tip Tracking

Two ways, on a toggle. Log Tips records each person's actual cash and card tips. Tip Pool splits a shared pool across the crew.

Tip History

What you logged over a date range: tips by staff, by week, and your saved pools.

Labor History

Your logged labor, three ways, in one place.

Paying it out

Pay Periods

Rolls each week, Monday through Sunday, into a payroll-ready summary: total hours, overtime and gross pay for everyone who worked.

Payroll Export

Pick a pay period and Bar Cop pulls everyone's hours, overtime, tip share and pay into one file you hand to whoever runs payroll. It is a worksheet for them to work from, not the payroll itself.

Two things Bar Cop adds that hours alone do not

Your labor cost is not just hours times wage, and Bar Cop works both of these out for you rather than leaving them to be discovered on a payroll run:

• The overtime premium, on hours past the threshold.
• Tip-credit makeup pay. A tipped employee whose cash wage plus tips lands under your state minimum is owed the difference, and that is real money the business pays, so it is in every cost number.

Wage and tip rules vary by jurisdiction. Bar Cop shows the arithmetic for planning and review, and the screens that touch it say so. Verify against your own state before you pay anyone.

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