Opening checklist: starting the day the same way every time

An opening checklist exists so that the first hour of trading does not depend on who happens to be opening. It is one of the few process documents whose value is obvious to the people using it, provided it stays short enough to complete honestly — and the failure mode is always the same: the list grows until it is faster to sign it than to do it.

What belongs on an opening checklist

• Safety items first, because they are the ones with consequences: fire exits clear, equipment guards in place, nothing blocking access.
• Temperature and equipment checks that have to happen before trading rather than during it.
• Readiness: float counted, systems logged in, stock replenished to the level the first hour needs.
• Anything that was flagged at close the night before and left for the morning.
• A short handover note from the previous shift, which is usually more useful than any fixed item.
• Not everything that could be checked — only what actually goes wrong, which is a much shorter list.

Keeping it from being signed blind

A checklist completed from memory in thirty seconds is worse than none, because it produces a record saying the checks happened. The defences are structural rather than motivational. Keep it to the length of the time genuinely available. Require values rather than ticks where a value exists, since writing a temperature requires reading one. Vary nothing arbitrarily but review the list quarterly, removing anything that has never once been found wrong. And have somebody spot-check the result occasionally — not to catch people out, but because a list nobody ever reviews is a list everybody correctly infers nobody reads.

Put the item most likely to be wrong at the top, not at the bottom. Attention is highest on the first two lines, and a list that opens with three things that are never wrong teaches the reader to skim.

Making the exceptions useful

1. Give every item a clear action when the answer is not «fine», or the checklist records problems without resolving them.
2. Name who to tell, by role, since the person opening is often the most junior on site.
3. Allow the shift to proceed where it safely can rather than implying everything stops, or exceptions go unrecorded.
4. Review exceptions weekly: the same item failing repeatedly is a maintenance issue, not a checklist issue.
5. Keep completed lists for a stated period, because they are the evidence that the routine existed.

Ettex Forms suits the daily completion — fixed items, values where values matter, the exception captured with it — so a month of openings is a filter rather than a folder. Closing has its own list and the handover between them is what makes both worth doing.