Opening and Closing Procedures for a Coin Shop

Make the bookends repeatable

Opening and closing procedures should be short enough to use every day and specific enough to expose an exception. A checklist that merely says “check inventory” will not tell the next employee what was counted, which location was included, or what to do when a quantity is wrong.

Build each step around an owner, evidence, and escalation rule. The owner performs or verifies the task. The evidence might be a system total, drawer sheet, seal number, signed handoff, or exception record. The escalation rule defines who decides what happens next.

Opening: establish today’s starting state

• Inspect the premises, alarm, restricted areas, and any tamper or overnight exception indicators.
• Verify each opening cash drawer by denomination and assign it to a staff member or workstation.
• Confirm scheduled appointments, deliveries, shipments, pickups, and outstanding customer-property handoffs.
• Review unresolved inventory, custody, payment, pricing, and document exceptions from the prior close.
• Confirm live spot, active buy and sell rules, product overrides, and approval contacts before the counter opens.
• Check scanners, printers, scales, cameras, payment devices, and required forms.

The objective is not to recount the entire business every morning. It is to validate the controlled opening points and surface anything that changed overnight.

Run a short operating huddle

A two-minute role check prevents expensive ambiguity. Name the person responsible for counter approvals, intake custody, cashier escalation, shipping handoff, and manager exceptions. If a role changes during the day, record the handoff.

Also identify the day’s unusual conditions: a large appointment, an employee absence, a high-value shipment, a coin-show pack-out, a known spot-volatility event, or a bank cutoff. The system should carry the record, but the team still needs a shared operating picture.

Closing: reconcile flows, not just balances

A drawer can balance even when a transaction is in the wrong client record or inventory location. Closing therefore needs to connect money, documents, and physical items.

• Reconcile cash, checks, card activity, wire or ACH status, deposits, refunds, and payouts to recorded transactions.
• Review incomplete, voided, reversed, unpaid, or approval-pending transactions.
• Confirm that purchased items moved to the intended review, cage, vault, refining, or available inventory state.
• Verify outgoing shipments, carrier handoffs, tracking references, and items awaiting pickup.
• Return loose merchandise, customer property, keys, devices, and documents to assigned secure locations.
• Record every unexplained variance with an owner and next-review time; never bury it in an adjustment without context.

Use two-person verification where risk justifies it

Dual control does not need to slow every task. Apply it to the points where one unnoticed mistake or unauthorized action would be costly: high-value inventory transfers, vault access, opening or sealing containers, large cash counts, manual price exceptions, and final custody handoffs.

The second person should verify the evidence, not simply add initials. A useful verification answers: what did you compare, what matched, and what happened to the exception?

Feed the daily close into month-end

Consistent daily close reduces the number of mystery items finance must unwind later. Unresolved payments, inventory variances, unshipped orders, customer property, and manual adjustments should be visible as an exception list throughout the month.

This turns month-end from a search for missing facts into a review of known items with owners and evidence.

Connect the daily record

See opening, counter, custody, and close in one workflow.

Use a real daily exception as the starting point for a private bullionOS walkthrough.