What is an Opening and Closing Checklist Template and why is it important?
The catering industry is typically a very fast-paced environment with lots of health and food safety regulations in place. Consequently, organisation and compliance are the ultimate key to success for any business.
Within the catering industry, the opening and closing shifts are arguably the most critical of the day with lots of important tasks that must be completed.
Therefore, utilising clearly defined opening and closing checklists within a template are helpful to ensuring the day-to-day operations of your business run smoothly.
Opening and closing checklists are lists comprised of all the tasks that need to be completed before and after each workday.
Using our opening and closing checklist template can help:
- Reduce forgetfulness and ensure every task that needs to be is completed this is especially pertinent for cleaning tasks for example, that can affect the health and safety of your customers.
- Decreases human error by establishing accountability among your staff if something goes wrong or a task is not completed.
- Reduces the amount of time it takes to complete a task as they can quickly be referenced to on the checklist.
Opening and closing checklists can be very beneficial to the organisation of your operations at a very small cost as they are cheap to create and replicate and are easily used by all.
They are an especially useful tool in industries like catering or hospitality where staff turnover is typically high.
How to create your own Opening and Closing Checklist Template
When creating your own opening and closing checklist template, it is important that you consider what information must be recorded so that your staff understand every task expected of them and what data you want to collect to evidence task completion and establish accountability.
To present all your opening and closing tasks in a clear and easy to read format, we recommend using a table structure as they are useful for displaying lots of information at once.
You should have separate sheets for your opening tasks and your closing tasks, and this should be clearly delineated somewhere on the sheet.
Your first column should be used to record each different task that must be completed at the start or end of the workday to ensure a successful opening or closing of your business.
Next you should include columns for each day of the week (or every day of the week your business is open) where the employee who completes a task can put their initials once finished.
This helps establish accountability for each different task that must be completed, so that if something should go wrong or a task is not completed you can work out exactly who is responsible.
Additionally, you may want to include a column where comments from either your employees or you can be recorded.
For example, if an employee is unable to successfully complete a task for any reason or had to go about the task in a different way, they can record their reasoning here.
Finally, you should include a column or a row like we have chosen to do in our free example which you can download below, where a manager can leave their initials to confirm that all opening and closing tasks have been completed satisfactorily.
Using Jomo247 to manage your daily opening and closing checklist template
Opening and closing rotas must often be reprinted fresh each week. This can create a heavy paper load that then has to be physically stored somewhere.
Jomo247, can help make your opening and closing checklist templates paperless helping reduce your impact on the environment whilst also cutting costs.
Once your opening and closing checklist template has been completed it is automatically stored in your system on the cloud and can be quickly accessed and referred to when needed, wherever you may be.
Jomo247’s timeline feature allows you to clearly track which employees were involved in each task and exactly when they completed it.
This means if a problem does occur you can quickly find out exactly who was involved, at which step of the task and when.
Employees could also upload photo or video files to each task to evidence that is has been completed successfully or highlight any issues that may have occurred during the process helping to establish a further degree of accountability among your employees.
Check out more of our free PDF compliance template downloads here.
