---
title: "Stock take types and requirements"
url: "https://help.aurapos.com/en/article/stock-take-types-and-requirements"
language: "en"
last_updated: "2026-04-01T13:23:43.695Z"
---

# Stock take types and requirements

Stock take types are an important setting when recording your stock takes, and have different requirements and consequences depending on which option is set.

It is important to understand that stock takes are *time sensitive*. When you create a stock take, you need to specify the date and time that those stock levels were taken.  
  
Typically the time you specify should be before you start trading for the day, or at the end of the day after the doors have been closed and there are no more sales for the day.

**Spot Count** stock takes can be performed daily or even multiple times per day to help troubleshoot potential stock losses over short time windows. Run the Stock Variance report between these spot counts to see if you're missing stock unexpectedly. Shorten the period to troubleshoot problematic stock items.

All the other stock take types allow you to run a **Gross Profit report** in addition to the Stock Variance report. This means you can generate **Weekly**, **Monthly** and **Annual** Gross Profit reports between those stock takes. These stock takes should be complete (we force at least 80% of items to be counted) as they are used to provide financial reporting, and without meaningful data those reports would be very inaccurate.

**Locked Periods**  
**Weekly** stock takes are not period-locking. This means that in week 3 of a month for example, I could go back to the first week in the month and capture a missing stock transfer or purchase if I realised late that I forgot to capture it at the time.

On the other hand, you will not be able to back date any transactions prior to the most recently posted **Monthly** or **Annual** stock take as those are period-locking.