Revenue Recovery is the top-line half of the job. Profit Recovery asks what your sales cost you. This asks whether you are selling the right things, at the right price, to enough people.

What it is for

Cutting cost has a floor. You can only take so much out of a pour before the drink is worse and the bar is thinner. Revenue has no ceiling in the same way, and most of it is decided by two things you already control: what is on the menu and what it costs.

This section reads your own sales, ranks every item on what it actually earns you, and prices the gap between where you are and your targets.

The same five rows as Profit

Revenue Audit, Revenue Playbook, Revenue Fix, Revenue Forecast and Experiments behave exactly as their Profit equivalents do. If you have read the Profit page you already know how they work, so this page covers what is different.

The Revenue Audit

Scores five areas: Check Average, Labor Efficiency, Menu Performance, Server Performance and Events. Same honest scoring as everywhere else: an area with nothing behind it is marked not enough data and left out rather than filled in with a middling number.

The menu, in three screens

Menu Builder

The one place you build and price your menu. Everything else in this section reads from it, so a thin menu here makes the rest of the section quiet.

Menu Rundown

Bar Cop's read on every item, built from the numbers instead of from what you happen to like eating. That phrasing is the app's own and it is the point of the screen.

Menu Engineering

Your pricing engine. It groups every item by margin and volume, which is where the familiar language comes from: the ones that earn and sell, the ones that sell but do not earn, and the Dogs.

An item Bar Cop cannot grade is counted and shown, never quietly dropped. An item with no cost or no price cannot be over or under target, so it cannot be judged either way. Rather than leave it out of the sum and call the rest of the menu a verdict, the ungradeable count sits beside the result. If that number is high, the board is not telling you much yet, and it says so instead of showing you a green all-clear on a menu it could barely read.

Dog Test Tracker

A Dog is low margin and low volume, and it is not always a bad dish. Some items are there because a regular orders them, because they anchor a price point, or because they make the menu make sense. The Dog Test is how you find out which of yours is genuinely dead weight before you cut something people came in for.

Server Check

Log each server's covers and sales for a shift and Bar Cop turns it into a check average, then tracks every server against your target. It is the difference between knowing your check average and knowing whose it is.

Revenue Forecast

Each week is projected from a weighted average of the same weekday across your last eight weeks of sales and covers, plus the revenue of any events you have booked for that week.

Same weekday matters: a Tuesday is forecast from Tuesdays. A bar's week is not eight identical days, and an average that pretends otherwise is wrong in both directions.

It is a projection and it is labelled as one wherever it appears. It never mixes with money you have banked.

What it feeds

• Check average on Week in Review and Week History.
• Menu costing, which feeds your cost of goods through your recipes.
• The Revenue Audit score and its Fix system.
• Events, where a booked event's revenue lands in the forecast.

Where to start

Menu Builder, and it is worth an hour at a desk rather than ten minutes on a phone. Nothing else in this section can say anything useful until your items have a cost and a price against them, and that one job is what turns Menu Rundown, Menu Engineering and the Dog Test on.

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