Variance is your leak detector. It takes what your counts say you used and compares it to what your POS actually sold. The gap is product that left the bar without a matching sale: over-pour, theft, give-aways, or a count error. You need at least two counts before it can read usage, so take a couple of weekly counts first.

1. Set your variance standards

Open Inventory → Variance Report. At the top, the Set Variance Standards card holds one number per category: the variance you will accept before it flags. Below the number is OK, above it flags. Good starting points are liquor 2%, wine by the glass 3%, bottle beer 2%, draft 10%, mixers 10%, and food 5%. By the Bottle flags the moment a single bottle is unaccounted, because it is bottle-in, bottle-out. Set these once. They drive both the Quick Check and the deep dive, and they are never frozen into a saved run, so tightening a standard re-judges your whole history the same way.

2. Run the Quick Variance Check

This is the fastest read, and it needs no file. Pick a count period with the arrows, and Bar Cop shows what each beverage category should have rung at your standard pour pricing. Pull your sales-by-category report off your POS and type the actual sales into each row. The variance fills in instantly, per category and overall, with last period beside it.

The Quick Check assumes your drinks are priced off your standard pour costs. Food and recipe items are covered in the deep dive below.

3. Read the flags

Any category that runs past the standard you set turns amber, and the trend strip marks any past period that breached. A few percent is normal over-pour and rounding. A big gap is where to look. Start with the category that flagged and the period it started in.

4. Dig deeper with a full POS upload

For product-by-product detail, scroll to Dig Deeper and drop in a product sales report from your POS for that exact date range. Map the product name, quantity, and sales columns once. Bar Cop remembers the mapping for next time and saves the run so you can look back at it later.

5. Map anything unmatched

Any POS row that does not line up with a product or menu item shows under Unmatched. Map each one once and Bar Cop remembers it for every future upload. Cocktails and plates explode through their recipe so each ingredient gets its share. If a product sells in more than one size, map the pitcher line to the pitcher size and it draws the right ounces and revenue. Then hit Run Report.

6. Read the two views

Sales Variance is in dollars: what the product you poured should have rung up versus what the register actually rang. Usage Variance reads in each category's own unit: liquor and wine in ounces, pours, and bottles; draft in ounces and kegs; bottle beer bottle for bottle; mixers in quarts; food per ingredient. The $ Var column puts a dollar on every line. Red is over recipe, money that walked. On the Usage tab, Over Recipe totals the dollars used past what your recipes and sales account for, and Recipe Coverage is the share of POS sales that made it into the read. Low coverage means lines are still unmatched. Map them and both numbers tighten.

Comps and waste come out first. Bar Cop subtracts your logged comps and waste from the used number before comparing to sales, so variance is unexplained loss, not the give-aways you already tracked.

7. Watch the trend in History

Every run saves against its count period, so the History tab shows your variance trend period over period. Step through past periods with the arrows or click a row in History to reopen it. Re-running a period replaces it.