30 June is a date in your accounts. It is almost never the date in your warehouse. Most businesses count a few days either side and adjust — which is fine, and normal, and only works if somebody decides in advance which side and who is keeping the list. This page is about landing on the date.
We sell stocktaking software and scanners, so this is a strange place to start. It is also the first thing to find out, and nobody selling you something is likely to raise it.
The ATO's simplified trading stock rules say that if you are an eligible small business and you estimate the value of your trading stock changed by $5,000 or less over the year, you can choose not to do a formal stocktake and simply carry last year's closing figure forward. If the change is more than that, the general rules apply and you count.
That is the whole concession in a sentence, and it is worth thirty seconds of your accountant's time before you book anything. We are not tax advisers and this is not advice — eligibility depends on your turnover and your circumstances, and the rules change. Ask the person who signs your return, and read it from the source: ATO — simplified trading stock rules.
And the reason most businesses count anyway. The tax position is the floor, not the reason. A count tells you what you can actually sell, what has been sitting there for four years, what has walked out the door and what your insurer would want evidence of. Plenty of our customers would count even if the ATO never asked, and the ones who have been counting for fifteen years are not doing it for the return.
Two different jobs. The second one is the one your accountant asked for, and there are four honest ways to do it.
The cleanest answer and the most expensive. Nothing in, nothing out, count it, open again. No adjustments, no argument, no list to keep. If you can afford the trading day, take it — everything below exists because most people cannot.
Count the weekend before, then add everything received and subtract everything despatched between the count and close of business on the 30th. The most common approach, and the one that goes wrong quietly if the movement list is kept by three people in three places.
The same thing in reverse, in the first days of July. Useful when June is flat out and the first week of July is not. Same rule: one list, one owner.
Possible, and the hardest to defend afterwards. If you go this way, count each area in one unbroken run and freeze that area while it is being counted — a building that is half counted and fully trading is where double counts come from.
Whichever you pick, one person owns the movement list and it lives in one place. Every receipt and every despatch between the count and the date, on one document, kept by one person. That list is what makes the count defensible; a count with a movement list nobody can produce is just a number.
The work does not get smaller because the deadline is fixed. It just gets more expensive to discover late.
The accountant conversation, the shut-or-trade decision, and whether you have the people. Everything after this is logistics; this is the only part that needs someone to make a judgement.
Export the part file and actually look at it. Name every location, including the floor space and the container out the back. Get labels up. If you are hiring scanners, this is the month — the last fortnight of June is the one that runs out first. Hire rates and booking →
Counters scanning actual stock and actual labels during a normal week, with no count running. Bad part numbers and unreadable labels turn up while there is still time to reprint. This is the step that gets skipped and the one that pays for itself.
Devices and spare batteries on charge the night before. Everyone told which area is theirs and what to do about stock that moves. Final data load on the morning, then start — and do not reload it halfway through.
Unscanned parts, unvisited locations and bins checked and found empty. Deal with those three lists first. Reconciling before you have closed them means investigating variances that were only ever somebody not going up a ladder.
The method behind all of this — the decisions, counting by location, why you never print the expected quantity — is on its own page, and the step-by-step version with our portal in it is the setup checklist.
It decides whether the cleanest option — shut the doors and count — costs you a trading day or a weekend of penalty rates.
| Year end | Falls on a | What that usually means |
|---|---|---|
| 30 June 2027 | Wednesday | Mid-week. Counting on the day costs a full trading day, so most will count the weekend of the 26th and 27th and roll forward. |
| 30 June 2028 | Friday | Kind. Shut Friday afternoon, count into Saturday, open Monday with nothing to roll. |
| 30 June 2029 | Saturday | The easiest of the three, if your people will work it. |
A count that runs over a weekend costs no more to hire scanners for than one that finishes on the Friday — four days and seven days are the same rate.
Plenty of Australian businesses do not have a June year end, and plenty that do choose to count at a quieter time and reconcile. Our longest-running stocktake customer counts in October and has done for fifteen years. Every rule above works for any date — count on it, count early and roll forward, count late and roll back, keep one movement list.
The only thing June changes is that everyone wants the same fortnight. Outside it, a week's notice is usually plenty and the scanners are mostly sitting on the shelf.
What you held, valued, as at the year end — with the movement list that gets from the day you counted to the day they asked about.
Short, over, expected but never found, and found but never expected. Four different conversations, and lumping them into one number loses all of them.
Who counted what and when, which areas were checked and found empty, and what a withdrawn figure used to say. Not to catch anybody — so a number can be asked about rather than argued about.
On MYOB AccountRight, the Inventory Count Sheet loads into a stocktake as it comes and the comparison is done for you. Counting against a MYOB file → The adjustment itself belongs in your accounting system, where the audit trail is.
Tell us roughly what you hold, how many people you can put on it, and which side of the date you are counting. If we think you would be better off shutting for a day and counting on paper, we will say so.