Menus is where every dish and every drink gets costed, priced and ranked on what it actually earns you. It reads the prices already tracked in your inventory, so a vendor price rise moves your food cost here without you retyping anything.

What it is for

Most menus are priced once and then left alone while costs move underneath them. This section keeps the two together: what an item costs you today, what you charge for it, and how it is doing against everything else on the same page of your menu. You get the answer per item, with the move that fits it.

Menus sits on the rail under Menus. It has five screens and you only ever start in one of them.

Start in Menu Builder

Everything else on this section reads what you put here, so nothing works until your menu is in.

There are three tabs and each one behaves differently, because the items do. Dishes and Mixed Drinks get a recipe builder, so you add ingredients and the cost computes itself. Skip the recipe and you can type a flat cost instead. No Prep items link straight to a product you already track in Inventory, and the cost and the menu price both fill in from that product. The price stays yours to change.

A poured product like draft beer or wine by the glass carries a pour size. A food or resale item carries a portion. Bottle beer sells whole.

Enter units sold as they come in. Every ranking on the next two screens is weighted by how often an item actually sells, so an item with no units sold is an item Bar Cop cannot judge.

Your sections are your sections

The Category on each item is the section it sits in on your real menu, and every tab keeps its own list. Dishes get Appetizers, Entrees, Sides and Desserts. Mixed Drinks get Cocktails, Shots and Frozen. No Prep gets Beer, Wine, NA Beverages and Snacks. Tap Edit next to Category to add your own, hide the ones you do not run, or reset to the defaults. Because the lists are separate, the dish form never offers you a drink section.

Laying your menu out is not the same as being judged. Dishes and No Prep items are compared inside their own section, because an appetizer is not an entree and a six dollar beer is not a sixty dollar bottle of wine. Every mixed drink is compared against every other mixed drink whatever section you file it under, because a frozen margarita and a house old fashioned earn their money the same way. So you can rearrange your bar menu without changing a single ranking.

Getting a whole menu in at once

Switch the form to Import File and drop a spreadsheet. You map the columns, then Bar Cop lists every item with the price it will land at and, where a price is moving, the price it is moving from. Nothing saves until you press the button on that screen. That matters more here than anywhere else, because a menu import moves prices and a price move feeds everything below.

Imported items arrive with no recipe. Edit one afterwards to build it or link a product.

Items that are not finished, and items you pulled

An item missing a price or a cost shows as Incomplete and stays out of Menu Engineering until you finish it. The banner at the top counts how many are still open.

Pulling an item off the menu is not deleting it. Edit the item and use Make Inactive to retire a seasonal dish, and it keeps its recipe, its price and its history. Make Active brings it straight back.

The four screens that read it

Menu Rundown

One briefing per item, written from that item's own figures: its margin against the rest of its group, where it ranks, its units-sold trend, its cost percent against target, the biggest single cost in the recipe, and the move that fits. Only an item that really is the bottom of its group is called the bottom, and an item that ties with another is never called either.

Each tile leads with cost, cost percent, menu price, and menu mix, which is that item's share of the units sold in the group it is read against. Cost percent is colored by where it lands: red over your target, amber close on either side, green comfortably under. Beer, wine and NA items carry no cost target, because they are priced on markup rather than to a percentage, so their cost percent shows with no color at all.

Every tile ends with a button that takes you to the work: Reprice opens the change in Menu Engineering, Dog Test opens the 90 day test, Edit Item opens Menu Builder.

Menu Engineering

The ranking. Each item is measured against its own category, so entrees compete with entrees. A category needs at least four priced items to form a fair group; smaller ones sit under Too Few to Rank rather than being scored against nothing.

For any item over its target cost percent, Bar Cop shows the price that brings it back to target and the weekly dollars that move with it if volume holds. It only ever suggests a raise, never a cut.

Repricing models the new margin and cost percent, and shows how far volume can fall before the raise stops paying for itself. Add an expected volume change if you want to be held to a prediction.

Planned is not live, and the difference is the point

A reprice saves as a planned price first, because changing a number on this screen is not the same as changing your real menu. You might be planning a whole overhaul. The item shows the plan next to your current live price.

When the new prices actually go out, press Mark Live. That is the moment Bar Cop logs the change and starts tracking it, so what you see reflects your real menu and never a plan on paper.

Every change lands in the Pricing Review Log at the bottom of the screen. Once three weeks of units sold come in, Bar Cop checks the real weekly margin swing against what you predicted. A price rise is recorded as a logged change with its date, never as a recovered dollar figure, because a raise only pays if volume holds.

Recipe Summary

A read-only look at what your recipes cost against what you charge. It counts how many items are costed from a recipe, how many of those run over target, how many still need a recipe at all, and how many pull their cost from a linked inventory product.

Items with recipes cost themselves from current product prices, so when a vendor raises a price these move on their own. Items missing a recipe carry a hand-typed cost, and adding an ingredient recipe switches them to live costing. Work takes you to that item's editor in Menu Builder.

Dog Test Tracker

The rework-or-cut path for an item that is not earning its slot. Pick the item and Bar Cop fills the baseline from its current weekly units sold. Note what you changed, a new position on the page or a new description, and start it. The test runs 90 days and the card shows the lift against baseline while it counts down.

When it completes, Keep It if volume moved enough to justify the slot, or Cut It to pull it off the menu. Either way the decision snapshots the final volume. A cut item moves to Inactive on Menu Builder with everything intact, so you can bring it back.

Keeping it honest

Everything on this section runs on units sold, so the page is only as good as those numbers. The Re-import Units Sold drop at the top of Menu Engineering takes your product mix export and matches each row to a menu item by name. The file stops on a check screen first, one line per item, and nothing saves until you press Update there.

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