Shift handover notes: what opening and closing crews should share

Written by Roster Flow. Published 13 August 2026.

The close knows the grinder has started jamming, the chicken delivery was short and two of the Saturday staff have swapped shifts. The opener finds out at 6:45, with the doors about to open and nobody to ask. None of it was a secret. It just was not written down where the next crew would see it.

A handover note fixes that for a few minutes of work. This article covers what opening and closing crews should put in one, what to leave out, how to build the handover into the roster and how to make sure it gets read. Opening and closing duties covers the tasks themselves; this is about what the crews tell each other.

What a handover note is for

A handover note is a short record of anything the next shift needs to know or do because of what happened on this one. It is not a diary of the day, a checklist of routine tasks or a place to air complaints. A good one does three jobs.

• It passes on open items. Anything started and not finished, with the name of the person who will finish it.
• It warns about problems. Equipment faults, stock that ran out, hazards and customers who need a call back.
• It confirms what is done. So the next crew does not redo it, or check it again because nobody was sure.

If an item needs nothing from the next shift and will not matter tomorrow, leave it out. A handover of six useful lines gets read. A page of everything that happened gets skimmed.

What the closing crew should pass to the openers

The close to open handover matters most, because nobody overlaps: the closers have gone home by the time the openers arrive, so whatever is not written down is lost. Work through these areas before you lock up.

Keep each entry to one line. The opener should be able to read the whole note standing at the register.

What to pass on at a mid-shift changeover

Many small businesses also change crews in the middle of the day: a morning team hands over to an afternoon team, or the lunch floor to the dinner floor. Here the crews usually overlap, which makes it tempting to hand over by talking. Talk, but write the open items down as well, because the person you tell may not be the person who has to act.

• What is prepped, what is running low and what has sold out
• Deliveries received and checked, and any still to arrive
• Changes to tonight’s bookings, functions or orders
• Calls and messages waiting to be returned
• Anyone who went home early or is covering a gap, so the next lead knows who is on
• Breaks already taken and breaks still to come, so nobody on a long shift misses theirs

Use one format and keep it short

The easiest handover to write and read is a simple log with a line for each item. The shift handover template uses five columns: the time, the area, what happened or needs doing, its status and who follows up. Whatever you use, a few rules keep it useful.

• Write items as they happen. A note written from memory at the end of a long close misses what mattered at 11 o’clock.
• Give every item a status. Done, open or recorded elsewhere. The opener can skip the done items and go straight to the open ones.
• Name an owner for every open item. "Grinder jamming" is a complaint. "Grinder jamming, Sam to call the technician at 9" is a handover.
• Say what was done, not just what went wrong. "Coolroom door not sealing, stock moved to the upright fridge" tells the next crew not to move it again.
• Keep it in one place. A book by the register, a clipboard by the back door or one shared document, not a mix of all three.

What to leave out

The whole next crew reads the handover, and a book by the register can sit where customers see it. Some things do not belong in it.

• Personal details about staff. If someone called in sick, write that their shift is covered and by whom, not why they are away.
• Complaints about colleagues. Take those to the manager directly. A note that blames someone gets a defensive reply, not a fix.
• Alarm codes, safe combinations and passwords. Anyone who picks up the book can read them.
• Roster changes that have not been made on the roster. Write that a swap was approved only once the roster itself shows it. Communicating roster changes covers telling the people affected.

A handover is not the official record

Some events need their own record as well as a line in the handover. Employers must notify their work health and safety regulator immediately after becoming aware of a workplace death, a serious work-related injury or illness or a dangerous incident, as Safe Work Australia explains. The duty applies through each state and territory’s own laws, so check the details with your regulator. Record an incident wherever your business records incidents, and use the handover only to tell the next shift it happened and what is still to do.

Food safety works the same way. Under Standard 3.2.2A, a category one business, which is a caterer or food service business that processes unpackaged potentially hazardous food into food that is both ready to eat and potentially hazardous, must keep records, or be able to show in another way, that it meets the requirements for safely receiving, storing, processing, displaying and transporting that food and for cleaning and sanitising. If a temperature check was missed or food was thrown out, put it in the handover so the next shift acts on it, and keep the record itself with your food safety records.

Build the handover into the roster

A handover squeezed into unpaid minutes before or after a shift is the first thing skipped on a busy day. The Fair Work Ombudsman’s page on unpaid work says time spent in training is time worked, and that compulsory meetings can count as time worked and need to be paid. If you require a handover, put it inside rostered hours rather than asking people to come in early or stay back. Some awards also treat that time as overtime. Under the Fast Food Industry Award 2020, for example, a full-time or part-time employee is paid at the overtime rate for hours worked before their rostered start or after their rostered finish (clauses 20.2(b) and (c) and 20.3(b) and (c)). Check yours with the Fair Work Ombudsman’s Find my award tool, and see preventing accidental overtime for how the minutes add up.

• Close to open. Roster the last few minutes of the close for writing up the note, and the first few minutes of the open for reading it.
• Mid-shift changeover. Overlap the outgoing and incoming leads by 10 or 15 minutes, so they can walk the floor together.
• One person responsible. Put the handover on one named person’s shift, usually the supervisor or the most senior person on, so it is somebody’s job.

The cost is small and easy to see. A cafe that trades seven days and overlaps its morning and afternoon leads by 10 minutes each day adds 70 minutes a week, or 1 hour 10 minutes, to the roster. That is a known figure in the wage budget rather than time nobody has costed. The roster cost calculator shows what it adds to your week.

Make sure it gets read

A handover only works if the next shift reads it before starting work. Make reading it part of the open, not something people do if they have time.

1. Read it firstThe opener reads the note before the doors open, so a fault or a short delivery changes the plan in time.
2. Sign it offThey initial the note with the time they read it. A note without initials tells the manager it was not read.
3. Act on the open itemsEach open item is done, passed to its named owner or carried into that shift’s note. Nothing stays open without a name against it.
4. Tell the rest of the crewAnything that affects everyone, such as a sold out item or a broken machine, is mentioned as the next crew starts.
5. Review the weekThe manager reads the week’s notes. The same fault or shortage three times in a week is a problem to fix, not a line to keep writing.

Keep the note out of the group chat. A message sent at 10 pm is buried under replies by morning, and a new starter may not be in the chat at all. Group chats and rostering apps explains why message threads lose information.

A worked example: a cafe’s Friday close

A cafe trades from 7:00 to 15:00 and closes with two staff. This is an example of the handover they leave for Saturday’s opener, in the five column format.

Seven items: four open, two recorded elsewhere and one done, and every open item has a name against it. Saturday’s opener reads the note at 6:30, checks the floor by the back door, bakes a batch of banana bread and a batch of muffins, and knows to weigh the chicken when the 8:00 delivery arrives. The owner has three jobs for the morning: confirm the technician, review the till and correct Tom’s break before payroll. Fixing missing clock-ins covers that last one.

The handover note itself stays in whatever your business uses for it. Roster Flow handles the roster around it: availability and leave from staff phones, the roster published to everybody at once, clock ins that become timesheets, and approved hours sent to Xero, MYOB or a CSV file.

A checklist for shift handover notes

• Every handover uses the same format, kept in one place
• Items are written as they happen, each with a status
• Every open item has a named owner
• Closers cover stock, equipment, food safety, money, bookings, people and hazards
• Staff health details, complaints and codes stay out of the note
• Incidents and food safety records are kept in their proper place as well
• Handover time sits inside rostered, paid hours
• The opener reads and initials the note before the doors open
• The manager reviews the week’s notes for repeat problems

Sources

• Fair Work Ombudsman: unpaid work
• Fair Work Commission: Fast Food Industry Award 2020 [MA000003]
• Fair Work Ombudsman: find my award
• Safe Work Australia: incident notification
• Food Standards Australia New Zealand: Standard 3.2.2A food safety management tools

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