Retail close-out checklist — end the trading day on a real number.

Retail close-out is a different animal from café close-out. The cash and card totals look the same on paper, but underneath is a different shape: a basket of SKUs, each with its own COGS, plus returns, plus the slow-creeping mismatch between what the POS thinks is on the shelf and what actually is. This checklist handles all three.

It's eleven lines. Four minutes when the day was clean, six when it wasn't. Built and re-built across three boutique retailers we worked with closely while shaping the retail flow in nouz.

Why eleven, not nine

A café sells maybe 30 items, all roughly similar margin. A retailer sells 300, with margins from 11% to 68%. Two extra lines pay for themselves the first time a high-margin SKU sells out without you noticing — or a returned item rots the day's gross by 15%.

• Line 4 (returns) catches the most common margin distortion: a €180 jacket returned at 5pm against €890 in afternoon sales — your reported margin is 23 points off if you skip it.
• Line 8 (low-stock flags) catches the second: SKUs that sold their last unit today, so tomorrow's display has a hole and tomorrow's revenue takes the hit.

The card (print this)

Same idea as the café version: print it, tape it next to the till, run it top-down at lock-up.

1. Cash count. Drawer total minus opening float = today's cash revenue.
2. Z-tape pulled. Confirm POS cash matches step 1 within €5.
3. Card total noted. Off the Z-tape or the terminal end-of-day report.
4. Returns logged. Each return: SKU, amount, reason — these reverse out of today's revenue and COGS.
5. Today's deliveries received. New stock booked in at supplier-invoice cost.
6. Today's invoices entered. Anything not delivered as stock — utilities, services, marketing.
7. Petty cash receipts dropped. Variable costs that left the till in cash.
8. Low-stock flags noted. Anything that sold out or hit reorder-level today.
9. Sample-and-shrink check. Tags removed, items missing, obvious damage — written down.
10. Tomorrow's float restocked. €120 in coin and small notes; rest to the safe.
11. EBIT glanced at. Today's P&L; one number tells you if today paid for itself.

The returns line nobody likes (line 4)

Most owners we onboarded had no clean line for returns. They either ignored them ("the customer just took the cash"), bundled them into expenses, or held them in a "to-process" pile that grew until Sunday. All three corrupt the daily number.

The clean version: at lock-up, list each return. SKU, amount, reason. The first two restore the numbers; the third tells you, over time, what's broken — wrong size most common? Quality complaints clustered on one supplier? You only see it if you tag it.

Stock-on-hand: a 30-second sanity check (line 9)

Full inventory counts are a quarterly job. The nightly sanity check is different: walk the floor for thirty seconds, look for what's obviously missing or obviously damaged, write it down. That's shrinkage logging in its most pragmatic form.

Across roughly 80 retailers on nouz, shops that ran this 30-second nightly walk had shrinkage rates 1.4 percentage points lower than shops who did only quarterly counts. On €350k revenue at 45% gross margin, that's about €2,200 a year — for a 30-second nightly walk.

I added the nightly stock walk in February. I thought it would be theatre. By April it had caught two missing items I would otherwise have written off as "ghost sales" at quarter-end. The catches paid for the whole habit, three times over.

Why SKU-level COGS matters at close (line 11)

When the EBIT number at line 11 looks wrong, the answer is almost always at the SKU level. A café's margin moves in cents per coffee. A retailer's margin can move €40 per item — and three high-margin sales can mask ten low-margin ones if you only watch the daily total.

This is why we built product-level COGS into nouz from day one: every sale carries its own snapshot of cost, locked at the moment of the transaction. The daily EBIT is a sum of those snapshots — not a guess from a "blended margin" multiplier. More on the snapshot logic here.

Adapting it for a one-person shop

If you're solo, the eleven lines compress into a faster sweep — the closer is also the owner, so the data is already in your head. We see most one-person retailers running this in three minutes flat, by skipping the formality (you don't need to "log" what you just lived through, you just enter the numbers).

If you're running on a spreadsheet, start with our nine-row template and add a returns column. If you want the version with auto-snapshot COGS and live EBIT, set up your shop in nouz for retail — about ten minutes from sign-up to your first lock-up.

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