A Daily Checklist for Running a Gaming Cafe
· 5 min read · The GameBiller team
Most problems a gaming cafe owner deals with in a given week were preventable by a five-minute routine on a given day. This is a checklist you can hand to whoever opens tomorrow.
Opening
Count the cash float and record it. Not approximately — the actual number, written down, before anything is sold.
Check every station powers on and reaches the desktop or home screen. Finding a dead machine at opening is a repair; finding it when a customer sits down is a refund and a bad first visit.
Confirm the internet is up on more than one machine, and that your backup connection works. Test it rather than assuming.
Check that no station is showing a session left running from last night. If one is, find out why before you clear it.
Glance at snack stock for anything that will run out today.
During the shift
Start the timer when the customer sits, not when you get a moment. Every minute of delay is unbilled and unrecoverable.
Add snacks to the bill as they are handed over, not from memory at the end. Memory is where snack revenue goes to die.
When a session ends, end it in the system immediately so the seat is free for the next person, even if payment has not happened yet.
Note anything broken the moment it is noticed. A wobbly chair or a dead USB port reported at the time gets fixed; the same fault remembered at closing does not.
Closing
Confirm no sessions are still running. Anything left open bills into tomorrow or gets discarded, and both are wrong.
Settle every unpaid bill from the day, or record deliberately why one is outstanding.
Count cash against what the system says was taken in cash. Do it tonight — a discrepancy found now is a conversation with someone who remembers; found on Sunday it is unanswerable.
Check the day total against your rough sense of how busy it was. That instinct is a surprisingly good anomaly detector, and it only works if you check daily.
Note stock to reorder.
Weekly, in ten minutes
Compare this week to last: total revenue, busiest hours, and revenue by station type.
Review discounts given and by whom, and any sessions reset rather than billed.
Look at which stations earned least. A machine at the back that nobody chooses is a layout problem, not a hardware one, and moving it is free.