New Location Opening Checklist Template
Four documents and four sheets where every task carries the date it has to start, scheduled backwards from the day you intend to trade.
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The Backward Pass, Run Twice
Wexford Table, location 15
Lease signed 15 Feb 2026. Possession 1 May. Announced open 15 Oct 2026. Plan written 2 Mar 2026. Rent $14,200 a month.
| Lead times used | Runway | Earliest open | vs announced |
|---|---|---|---|
| What the authorities publish | 147d | 25 Sep 2026 | 20 days early |
| Wexford's own 14 openings | 219d | 6 Dec 2026 | 52 days late |
The date was gone before the ink dried
The pass says the network had to start 25 Dec 2025 to hit 15 October. The lease was signed 15 Feb 2026. Every task on the 294-day critical path carries the same 52-day slip, and nothing has gone wrong on this project yet.
| Late | Start-by | Keys? | Task |
|---|---|---|---|
| 67d | 25 Dec 2025 | no | Landlord as-built drawings obtained |
| 61d | 31 Dec 2025 | no | Design drawings produced |
| 31d | 30 Jan 2026 | no | Drawings approved by Brand and Ops |
| 21d | 9 Feb 2026 | no | Building permit application prepared |
| 9d | 21 Feb 2026 | no | Building permit review lodged |
Five of 38 tasks past their latest start. None of them need the keys, so all five could have started in February. On published lead times, none of the five look late at all.
Every new-location opening checklist on the open web is the same artifact: a forward countdown organised into phases. Ninety days out, sixty days out, opening week. It reads like a plan and contains no arithmetic anywhere in it. So it cannot tell you that the building permit application had to be lodged before the phase it sits in even begins. It cannot tell you the announced date was unreachable the day the lease was signed either.
So the lead times are the artifact here, and they run backwards. Every external clock is recorded twice: what the authority publishes, and the median days it actually took across your own prior openings, with the first-pass rejection rate compounded in. A rejection restarts the review queue rather than extending it. On the worked site, a fifteenth opening for a fourteen-location operator called Wexford Table, eight external clocks total 203 published days and 452 observed ones.
That gap is 249 days of queue no published-target plan contains. Run the same thirty-eight-task network both ways and the earliest open moves seventy-two days, from twenty days early to fifty-two days late. Five tasks are already past their start-by date, all five needing no site access, and on published times none look late. Send River the lease and your prior openings, or take the files blank. Standards across sites belong in a multi-location standards space, and the procedures in an SOP library.
What's in the pack
Opening Checklist
Thirty-eight tasks, each with a start-by date from the backward pass, a slack column, and a flag for whether it needs site access.
Permit and Licence Tracker
The only place published targets live. Observed median, first-pass rejection rate, correction days and the expected duration that compounds them.
Vendor Setup
Setup lead time, what each vendor needs from you, the standing delivery window and the dock access, since that pair is what blocks a health inspection.
Hiring Plan
Recruiting and training dates read off the same pass, with days on payroll before revenue and the cost of that carry per role.
Opening Plan
Both earliest open dates side by side, the critical path with the external share named, and what is already past its start-by date.
How Lead Times Are Derived
Why a published median cannot be used, and the rejection term that makes a thirty-day review a sixty-four-day clock.
Pre-open Comms
Every comms item with a start-by date and a column saying whether it is still reversible. Committed spend sits inside thirty days on purpose.
Day-one Runbook
The seven things that must be true before the doors, the soft open as a rehearsal at full price, and the three failures that repeat across prior openings.
How to use it
- 1
Open in River, or take it blank
Open the pack in River and hand it the lease, the permit list and whatever record exists of your last few openings, or download the Word documents and CSV sheets and work through them yourself.
- 2
Build the lead-time table before the schedule
Published target and observed median in separate columns, with the first-pass rejection rate compounded into the expected duration. Sum both columns and lead with the difference, because it is the argument for everything after it.
- 3
Give every task a real predecessor and an access flag
A predecessor is a physical or legal constraint, not a convention about who goes first. The access flag decides which tasks can start off the landlord's drawings before possession, which is the cheapest lever available.
- 4
Run the pass, then check the first date against the lease
Both directions, on both sets of lead times. If the network had to start before the lease was signed, that belongs in the first sentence of the report rather than three sections in.
Frequently asked questions
Is this template free?
Yes, and nothing is gated. The zip holds four Word documents and four CSV sheets, no account and no card. Edit with AI is the optional half: River derives the lead times, runs the pass both ways and tells you what is already late. More packs sit in the template library.
What format are the downloaded files?
Four Word documents and four CSV sheets, zipped. Excel, Numbers and Google Sheets open the sheets directly, and the plan, lead-time note, comms schedule and runbook open in Word or Pages. The checklist sheet carries both start-by columns, so the published-versus-observed comparison survives the download.
Why not just use a ninety-day countdown checklist?
Because nineteen of the thirty-eight tasks on the worked site have a start-by date more than ninety days before open, and four fall before the lease was signed. A countdown schedules all nineteen after their real latest start. That is arithmetic about the window rather than a criticism of any particular list.
Where do the observed lead times come from if this is our first opening?
They do not, and the honest move is to say so rather than substitute a published target quietly. Every clock with no prior record gets marked unverified in the tracker and named as the largest unknown in the plan. From the second opening onward the record exists, which is why the runbook hands its dates forward.
Is a published permit review target really that unreliable?
It is a service standard, and the honest authorities say so. The federal alcohol regulator publishes processing times and states that median days to process means half of applications take longer. A plan built on the posted median is wrong about half the time before anything goes wrong.
Can we start construction while a permit is still in review?
Often not, and that is a dependency rather than a risk. New Jersey requires food establishment plans to be approved before construction, with the health authority responding within thirty days of submission. Check your own jurisdiction, then draw the edge in the network.
Does this run the site once it is open?
No. This space opens one site and hands its dates to the next opening. Estate-wide consistency is a standards and variance job, a franchised site follows its own operations manual, and who may approve a date change belongs in an escalation matrix.
Find out whether the date survives before you announce it
Take the Word documents and CSV sheets blank, or open this pack in River and let it derive your own lead times and run the pass both ways first.
Edit with AI