The shift change is where money walks out the door. Not from the register. From the mess of a handoff that nobody owns and everyone assumes the other person handled.
I've watched AM bartenders leave without writing down a single thing, and the PM crew spends the first 45 minutes of service playing catch-up instead of serving guests. The fix isn't a longer checklist. It's a shorter one that actually gets done.
Here's the version I've used and revised across a lot of handoffs. It runs in under five minutes if both parties are paying attention.
That's the whole list. Ten items. Five minutes.
The reason most shift change checklists don't get used is that they're too long. Managers build them once in a moment of frustration and then wonder why nobody touches them. A checklist that a bartender will actually run through at the end of a 7-hour shift has to be short enough that skipping it feels like more work than doing it.
Post it on the inside of the service station door. Or right above the register. Somewhere in the sightline of whoever is walking out, not the person walking in.
The incoming bartender owns the follow-through. If something wasn't covered, ask before the outgoing bartender leaves the building. That's the deal.