Menu Engineering is your pricing engine. For every priced item it does two things: it sorts the item into Stars, Plowhorses, Puzzles, or Dogs against the other items in its own category, and it names the move plus the number behind it. It needs at least four complete items in a category to rank it.

1. Understand the ranking

Open Revenue Recovery → Menu Engineering. Each item is measured against its own category, not the whole menu, so entrees compete with entrees and beverages with beverages, because a soda was never going to out-earn a steak. A category needs at least four priced items to form a fair group; smaller ones sit under Too Few to Rank, and Incomplete items get finished in Menu Builder first.

2. Keep units sold current

Everything here runs on each item's weekly units sold, so the page is only as accurate as those numbers. They refresh on their own when you drop your product mix report at the Shift weekly close, matched to each item by name. To refresh between closes, the Re-import Units Sold drop at the top takes the same export on demand.

3. Read the suggested price

For any item over its target cost percent, Bar Cop shows the price that brings it back to target, the item cost divided by your target cost percent, and the weekly dollars that move with it if volume holds. It only ever suggests a raise, never a cut. The Weekly Upside up top is what repricing every over-target item to target would add each week.

4. Work the move, planned then live

Plowhorses and over-target items get a Reprice step that models the new margin, cost percent, and weekly impact, and shows how far volume can fall before the raise stops paying off. Dogs go to a 90-day Dog Test. A reprice saves as a Planned price first, shown next to your current live price, because changing a number here is not the same as changing your real menu. When the new prices actually roll out, hit Mark Live, the moment Bar Cop logs the change and starts tracking it.

Every change lands in the Pricing Review Log at the bottom. Once three weeks of units sold come in, Bar Cop checks the real margin swing against what you predicted. Pricing is tracked as a logged change with its date, not a recovered-dollar figure, because a raise only pays if volume holds.