It is now time to start planning for the stocktake.
For most of you, it is an ATO requirement for most organisations, as it states here {ATO link removed}
"If your business buys or sells stock, you usually need to do a stocktake to value your stock at the end of each income year if:
- your business turnover is $10 million or more
- your business turnover is less than $10 million and the difference between your stock level at the beginning and end of the year is more than $5,000 (you can make a reasonable estimate to determine this)."
Plus doing a stocktake has several commercial advantages.
Now here are some tips to help you plan the stocktake.
) Try and reduce the count. Why have the added cost of counting? Can you get rid of stock? For example, return as much of your inventory that is unsellable to your suppliers if you can, then you do not need to count it on the stocktake.
Make an EOFY sale. Everyone else does why not you?
) Make sure that your point-of-sale software is up to date with the stock listing, the last thing you want to do during the stocktake is entering in products.
) Plan an actual date for the stocktake. Some of my clients do a significant part of their stocktake outside, so you may need to look at the weather. Plus you may want to break it up in stages to reduce on any one day the workload.
) Make logical divisions for each section of the shop. This is particularly true if you have specialised stock that requires expertise to count.
Now go over the shop and make some order, so all the stock is tidy and in place.
) Make a policy on how you will be handling damaged stock? You will almost certainly find it on stocktake day, what are you going to do with it then?
) Make a convention which should be followed religiously on how the count will be done, e.g. commonly it is top to bottom and left to right. Now make sure everyone supports this order. Interesting, a study has shown that counting from right to left is more accurate than counting from left to right but slower.
) Lean the stocktake procedures in advance, even if you have done it a few times, the odds are you need a refresher course. Do a test run to get a feel of what is involved before the day? If you do not then on the day, you could have extra staff all waiting while you work it out. We will be releasing webinars on this very soon.
To help you we have updated the help documents in posBrowser's help files so press F1 while in the register and check them out.
There are four documents there; I suggest you look at:
Stocktake = Standard stock take doc using Posbrowser on its own to run the stocktake.
Stocktake with a PTD = Stocktaking with the help of a PDT
Stocktake with the stock management system = Stocktaking using the mobile PDA browser program.
3rd Party Stocktake guide = A guide on how to upload stocktake data to and from another program.
