Setup is done. This is what the first week actually looks like, what shows up the moment you close it, and what is deliberately still blank. Knowing the third one is what stops people thinking Bar Cop is broken in week two.

Day one, before any data

You do not have to wait to see something. On day one you can run your audits and read your Forecast, and Bar Cop will size the opportunity off what you have given it so far. The numbers get sharper every week, and Bar Cop always tells you which ones it does not trust yet rather than quietly rounding them up.

Work the week the way you already work

Bar Cop is not a thing you touch every day. Run your bar. Log the shift things as they happen if you use them, and leave the rest for one sitting at the end of the week.

• Counting is once a week, not nightly. One count is what gives you a real cost of goods.
• Drawer counts, voids, comps, walked tabs, waste and incidents are logged as they happen, by whoever is on. All of it is optional.
• Everything else waits for the close.

Your first close

Close The Week is one page with six rows. Two of them carry everything else:

1. Sales. Drop your POS report or type the week in. Nothing downstream works without it.
2. Hours. Drop your timeclock export or log them by hand. Only lands for people already on your roster.
3. Tips. Optional.
4. Cash over and short. Optional, and only if you reconcile drawers in Bar Cop.
5. Cost of goods. You do not enter this. It comes off the count you already took.
6. Catering. Optional, and only if you book events here.

Every row shows you both doors. Each piece has a drop zone for a file and a button that opens the page where you can type it in. You never have to guess which way is supported, and mixing the two across the week is fine.

What lights up the moment you close

Close week one and these stop being dashes:

• Cost of goods and your real pour cost, off your count.
• Voids and comps, if you logged any.
• Below par, which is your order sheet for the coming week.
• Hours logged and Overtime.
• An audit score, as soon as there is anything real to grade.

What is still blank, and when it fills

This is the part worth reading. Some numbers cannot exist yet, and Bar Cop says so on the card instead of showing you a guess.

• The movement cards need three closed weeks. They compare your latest week against the one three back, so two weeks genuinely is not enough. The card says "Needs three closed weeks" until then.
• Recovery dollars start around day 30. A new bar has no before to compare against, so Bar Cop uses your own first few weeks as the baseline and measures everything after against it. No baseline, no figure, and it tells you rather than inventing one.
• The number settles by about week eight. Before that it moves around as the window fills, which is normal and not the app changing its mind.

Your Fix pages carry a timeline showing exactly which of those phases you are in and how many weeks you have been running.

Audits need data, not time

There is no waiting period on any audit. Run one whenever you like. What decides the score is whether there is something real to grade: a component with nothing behind it is marked not enough data and left out of the score rather than filled in with a middling number. That is why an early audit can come back with sections scored and others blank, and why the score moves as you feed it.

Week two onward

Repeat the close. That is the whole routine. Once you have a few weeks in, Week in Review starts comparing them for you, the movement cards wake up, and the Fix systems begin pricing what your changes are actually worth.