Four records of the same box of fittings. None of them agree.
Stock reconciliation is comparing four records that should match and rarely do: what was ordered, what the supplier invoiced, what was used on jobs, and what the accounting package thinks is on the shelf. Automating it does not count the van for you. It shows you which van to count, and when.
The four records, and why they drift
A purchase order says what you meant to buy. The supplier invoice says what they charged for. The job says what a tradesperson used. The accounts say what is left. Each is right about its own question and each is maintained by a different person at a different time.
Materials inflation makes the drift expensive. The price of inputs to house construction rose 2.1% in the June quarter 2026 and 3.8% over the year, driven by raw materials, freight and fuel (ABS, Producer Price Indexes, June quarter 2026, released 31 July 2026). A fitting that was on the shelf at last year's price is written up at this year's, and nobody notices because nobody compared the records.
The reconciliation is not glamorous. It is a list of lines where the four records disagree, sorted by dollar value, delivered before someone orders more of a thing there are twelve of in a van.
What the nine systems we build against actually hold
Before anything is automated it is worth knowing which of your systems holds a stock quantity at all, because several of them do not.
- KNDR·01Xero: tracked inventory to 4,000 itemsXero manages "up to 4,000 finished items of inventory" and points you at a third-party app above that (Xero, Inventory, checked September 2026). Purchase orders are on every plan and convert to bills in one click (Xero, Purchase orders, checked September 2026).
- KNDR·02QuickBooks Online: Plus and Advanced onlyInventory tracking and purchase orders are marked as included on Plus and Advanced and not on Simple Start or Essentials (QuickBooks AU plans, checked September 2026).
- KNDR·03MYOB Business: unlimited on AccountRight Plus"Unlimited inventory" sits on AccountRight Plus at $165 a month at the regular rate; Lite and Pro cap inventory and offer a $22 a month add-on to lift it (MYOB AU pricing, checked September 2026).
- KNDR·04Simpro: stock by location, including vansSimpro tracks stock across storage locations, updates stock automatically when purchase orders are received, supports a barcode stocktake from a tablet and sets minimum stock alerts (Simpro, Inventory, checked September 2026).
- KNDR·05ServiceM8: no stock moduleThe add-on catalogue lists Bundles ("Group materials together into prebuilt bundles"), a subscription purchase order add-on called MyPO, and Supplier Invoice Import — but no stock-on-hand feature (ServiceM8 add-on catalogue, checked September 2026). Materials are costed to jobs; quantities on the shelf live somewhere else.
Where the join is
The join is the purchase order number. If it is on the supplier invoice, on the job and in the accounts, the four records can be matched by a machine. If it is not, they are matched by a person reading descriptions, and the automation has nothing to hold.
The tax invoice rules help here more than people expect. A tax invoice for a sale of $1,000 or more has to show the buyer's identity or ABN, and a supplier has 28 days to provide one on request (ATO, Tax invoices, checked September 2026). Suppliers who invoice properly are already giving you most of the fields the match needs.
For a ServiceM8 business the join usually runs job materials → Supplier Invoice Import → Xero bill, and the stock quantity is a spreadsheet we replace with a table. For a Simpro business the stock quantity already exists and the work is exposing the discrepancies between Simpro and Xero rather than creating a count. Simpro's API allows 10 requests a second per client build with no published daily cap (Simpro API documentation, checked September 2026); Xero allows 60 calls a minute and 5,000 a day per organisation (Xero developer docs, API limits, checked September 2026). Reconciliation is a nightly batch, so neither limit bites.
What the automation does not do
It does not count. A physical count is a person with a scanner, and the moment software claims otherwise you have a system that is confident and wrong about the shelf.
It does not fix a van that is a private warehouse. If materials go into a vehicle and are never booked to a job, the reconciliation will show a growing gap between purchased and used, which is useful and uncomfortable, and then it is a conversation rather than a build.
It does not replace a stocktake. What it changes is which items get counted and how often — the twenty lines with the largest unexplained gap, monthly, rather than everything, once, in the last week of June.
The arithmetic
Average weekly ordinary time earnings for Australian full-time adults were $2,083.70, seasonally adjusted, in May 2026 — about $55 an hour over a 38-hour week before on-costs. Add 12% super and the loaded figure is about $61 an hour before leave, insurance or a vehicle (ABS, Average Weekly Earnings, Australia, May 2026; ATO, Super guarantee, current rate).
Count two things. First, the hours someone spends matching supplier invoices to jobs and chasing the ones that do not match — at $61 an hour, four hours a week is about $12,700 a year. Second, the value of stock you cannot account for at the last stocktake. Most owners know the first number roughly and the second exactly, because the accountant wrote it down.
Then compare against what the products already give you. Simpro's minimum stock alerts and purchase-order receipting are in the licence (Simpro, Inventory, checked September 2026). If your problem is that nobody has switched them on, that is an afternoon, not a build, and we will say so.
Where this does not pay
Under roughly $50,000 of stock on hand, a monthly count of the expensive items is cheaper than anything we would build. Frequency and value are the test, as they are for supplier bills.
Consumables only — cable ties, screws, sealant — are not worth reconciling at line level. Treat them as an expense and move on.
And if your suppliers do not quote your purchase order number, fix that first. It costs nothing, it takes a phone call per supplier, and without it the purchase order flow and this page are both automating a match that cannot be made. If the systems on either side are among the nine we have built against, the checker will tell you in two clicks.
What we have not measured, and what we would measure for you
There is no reliable published Australian figure for how long reconciling stock across purchase orders, supplier invoices, jobs and the accounts takes in a small business, and we are not going to borrow one from a vendor whitepaper to make this page more persuasive. Most numbers you will see quoted for this were produced by companies selling the fix.
What we would do instead is count it on one of your jobs. Follow a single job end to end, note every time a human touches this step, and multiply by what that person costs loaded. That is a real number about your business and it takes an afternoon.
You can run the arithmetic yourself first — the leak calculator uses ABS, Average Weekly Earnings, Australia, May 2026 for the wage default and ATO, Super guarantee, current rate for super, and returns a range rather than a single confident figure. If the range comes back under our minimum engagement, that is a real answer and you should stop there.
The questions people actually ask.
01Won’t a proper inventory system solve this?
Sometimes. Simpro already holds stock by location, and if you are on it the fix is often configuration rather than software. On ServiceM8 there is no stock module to configure, so the choice is a third-party inventory product or a small table we maintain — and we will usually recommend the product if your stock is more than a few hundred lines.
02Can it count the van with the phone camera?
No, and we would argue against anyone who says yes. A photo of a shelf is unstructured input and a stock count needs to be exact. The reliable version is a barcode scanner in a person’s hand, and Simpro already supports that on a tablet.
03Where are your case studies?
Not published, because we do not have measured before-and-after numbers we can stand behind yet, and a case study without them is a story. Kindra AI was founded in 2025. When the measurements exist they will appear here with the sample size attached.
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Bring the one flow that keeps costing you a Tuesday afternoon. We map it live and tell you what we'd build, what we wouldn't, and what it costs.