Store Operations Checklist for Indian Retail Chains: The Complete Template (Opening, Closing, Merchandising, Compliance)

Opening

Opening is where most of the day's failures are decided. A store that opens ten minutes late with the AC off and the card machine untested loses the first customers of the day and spends the next hour catching up. The opening list is short by design: it has to be finished before the shutter goes up, so it stays to what a customer would notice in the first minute and what the store cannot recover from later, the float and the POS test. Photograph the frontage from the road at the published opening time; that one photo settles the opening-time question for the month.

• Shutter, lights, AC and music on; POS and card machine tested with a test bill and a card tap.
• Cash float counted by two people and logged.
• Floor, glass and fixtures clean; trial rooms and washrooms checked and stocked.
• Window and focal displays match this week's docket or planogram; price tags on every SKU.
• Offer signage for the current scheme up, old scheme down.
• Consent notice at the entrance and desk cards in place where conversations are recorded.
• Staff in uniform, name badges, daily brief done with the day's target and the pitch of the month.

During the day

The daytime list is a rhythm, not a form. The store manager walks the floor on the hour and looks at the same five things every time, so a demo unit that has been dead since eleven is found at twelve rather than at closing. The two items chains most often leave off are the stock-out log with the variant asked for, which is the only record of demand the store could not serve, and the number taken from the customer who did not buy, which is the only way a walk-in becomes a follow-up.

• Hourly floor walk: fixtures faced, demo units working and charged, queues under target.
• Stock-outs logged with the variant the customer asked for.
• Every non-buying customer asked for a number, with the reason they did not buy.
• Cash drops as per policy, logged in the drop register.
• Trial rooms and washroom re-checked in the early afternoon and before the evening peak.
• Second till opened when the queue passes the target length.

Closing

Closing protects the money and tomorrow's opening. Cash is counted by two people, never one; demo units go on charge so they are alive at opening; tomorrow's signage is staged so the morning team is not printing at half past ten. The incident log is the item most often skipped and the one the area manager most often needs a week later.

• Sales reconciled with POS; cash counted by two people and secured in the safe.
• Demo units charged and secured; high-value stock in the safe.
• Cleaning done; waste cleared; trial rooms reset; AC and lights off.
• Tomorrow's offer signage staged, today's expired signage removed.
• Incident and complaint log updated for the day.
• Shutter locked and alarm armed at the published time, photographed.

Weekly and monthly

Weekly and monthly items are the ones a daily list cannot carry: docket compliance after each campaign change, the safety equipment that expires quietly, and the statutory documents and displays that a regulator or a fire officer will ask for on the one day nobody expected. These are the Indian compliance items that belong on every chain's monthly list, in plain words and without section numbers; your compliance team will hold the exact requirements for your state and category.

• Legal Metrology: MRP displayed on every packaged product, and nothing billed above it.
• GST: every sale invoiced, the invoice carrying the store's GSTIN and the tax breakup, in the format your accountants have approved.
• Fire NOC current and displayed; extinguishers within their service date; exits clear, openable from inside and signed.
• Shops and Establishments registration current and displayed; opening hours and weekly off as registered.
• DPDP recording notice displayed at the entrance and the counter wherever conversations or video are recorded, in the languages your customers read; a template is at /learn/dpdp-consent-notice-retail-store-template/.
• Docket or planogram compliance photo audit after every campaign change, and a weekly spot check of the window and focal display.
• First aid box stocked and in date; pest control record current; CCTV recording on every camera with the correct date.
• Training completion and certification status for every advisor, with the product questions of the month asked of one advisor at random.

Cadence: who checks what, and how often

A checklist without a cadence becomes the store manager's problem alone, and a store manager auditing only themselves produces the same score every day. Four cadences share the load. The daily check is the store's own; the weekly and monthly checks bring in someone who does not work in the store; the quarterly check brings in head office and adds the one audit the others cannot do, the sales conversation itself.

How to turn the template into a scored audit

A ticked checklist tells you what the store manager believes. A scored audit tells you what the store looks like, in a number that can be compared across stores and months. The conversion takes eight steps and about a week of work for a chain of any size.

1. Rewrite every line as a yes-or-no question. "Floor clean" becomes "Is the floor mopped, the glass streak-free and every fixture dust-free before opening?" A scale from 1 to 5 invites negotiation; yes or no does not, and almost done is a no.
2. Name the photo for each item. The photo is the evidence, so it is specified in advance: "frontage from the road at opening time", "three random shelves", "one invoice from today". Items that are documents get a photo of the document, not a note that it was seen.
3. Weight the items so the total is 100. Customer-facing failures weigh more than back-office ones; a dark window costs more than an unlabelled cleaning cupboard. Do the weighting with the operations head, the VM lead and the compliance owner in one room, so nobody's items are weighted by someone else.
4. Mark the fatal items. Four to six items, typically the fire NOC, MRP display, the recording notice where recording runs, closing cash and the customer washroom. A no on a fatal item caps the audit at 69 whatever else scores, because a customer who sees that failure does not see the rest.
5. Set the pass mark and the bands. Start with 85 and above green, 70 to 84 amber, under 70 red, and recalibrate after three months of real scores. A band nobody reaches or nobody fails means the weights are wrong, not the stores.
6. Capture live, never from the gallery. Photos are taken in the app at the moment of the check, with time and location, and gallery upload is switched off. This one setting removes most of the backdated-photo problem described in /learn/how-to-stop-backdated-store-photos-and-fake-checklists/.
7. Turn every no into a task. Each failed item gets an owner, a due date and a required re-photo, and closes only when the re-photo is verified. Repeat failures on the same item escalate one level automatically.
8. Read the score next to sales. Put the operations score on the same page as conversion, average bill and the selling score, and review it in the same weekly meeting. An item failing in forty stores is a head office problem, not forty store problems.

From list to evidence

A checklist that is ticked is a claim; a checklist with a photo is evidence; a photo checked by an AI audit is evidence at scale. BorentisOps runs these lists on the store phone with live photo proof, scores each photo against the docket or display standard with its visual AI, Drishti, flags gaps and assigns fixes, and reads the result next to the store's sales conversation scorecard. It is built for brands that run their own showrooms and exclusive brand outlets, not for general-trade shelves. Wooqer and Pazo are established alternatives for the operations half alone.

The scored version of this template, with all 72 items, weights, fatal flags, the seven-step method for running it and how to read the score against the selling score, is the subject of /learn/store-operations-audit/. Use this page for the list; use that one when you are ready to score it.