End of financial year functions get planned in a hurry, usually in the last fortnight of June, usually by someone who has a budget to use and a week to use it in.
That rush is the only hard part, because in every other respect June is the easiest month of the year to put on a work event. The December scramble is six months away, venues are not full, suppliers are not booked out, and the prices reflect it.
15 EOFY party ideas
Fifteen formats that work for an end of financial year function, with the headcount each one suits and the thing that usually goes wrong. The detail on budget, timing and the June advantage is below the list.
- Run a tournament in your own office. Push the desks back, bring in two or three machines, run a bracket on a whiteboard and put the prize on the line. You are not paying for a room, which is most of the cost of a function, and a basketball or boxing machine posts a score, which is what starts the rivalry. This is our own trade, so weigh it accordingly. Best for 20 to 200 people, and teams spread across floors who never otherwise mix. Watch out: lift dimensions and loading dock access. Confirm both before you book anything heavy.
- A proper awards night. EOFY is the one time of year the numbers are actually in, so recognition lands instead of feeling arbitrary. Real trophies, a short list of categories, some of them deliberately silly. Best for any size, any budget. Watch out: length. Ten minutes is an awards segment, forty is a hostage situation.
- A long winter lunch. Book the venue you could not get in December and take the whole room. Starts at midday, finishes when it finishes. Best for 15 to 60 people. Watch out: a Friday lunch that was meant to end at three. Set an end time and mean it, or budget for the fact that it will not.
- A whisky, wine or cocktail tasting. Structured, warm, and it gives people something to talk about other than work. Someone walks the room and explains what you are drinking. Best for 10 to 40 people. Watch out: anyone who does not drink. A good host runs a parallel non-alcoholic flight, so ask before you book.
- Indoor go-karting. June weather makes this better than its summer equivalent, and a leaderboard does the social work for you. Best for 10 to 40 people with a competitive streak. Watch out: it is a short event. Book food either side or everyone is back in the carpark by two.
- Bowling or mini golf. Unfashionable and still effective, because people play in small groups and that breaks up the cliques without anyone organising it. Best for 15 to 60 people, mixed ages. Watch out: nothing much in June. This is the month you can actually get a lane.
- Escape room. Genuinely good for small teams and genuinely bad for large ones, because above about 24 you are split across rooms and never see each other. Best for 6 to 24 people. Watch out: the quiet half of the team. One loud person can solve the whole room while everyone else watches.
- A cooking or pasta class. Everyone has a task, so nobody is standing with a drink working out who to talk to, and people leave having made something. Best for 8 to 30 people. Watch out: dietary requirements. Ask before you book, not on the day.
- Trivia with ridiculous categories. Cheap, fast to organise, works at any headcount, and the in-jokes outlast the night by about a year. Best for any size. Watch out: questions that only the long-timers can answer. Mix in rounds the new starters can win.
- A comedy club booking. Low effort, winter-proof, and nobody has to make conversation for ninety minutes, which some teams need more than they admit. Best for 15 to 80 people. Watch out: the material. Ask the venue what is on that night before you commit the whole company.
- Ice skating, then somewhere warm. The one idea on this list that is genuinely better in June than December. Short session, then a pub with a fire. Best for 15 to 50 people. Watch out: injuries and the people who will not go on the ice. Make the warm part the main event.
- A prize wheel and a prize table. A spin the wheel setup gives everyone a reason to come to one spot at some point in the night, which matters when a room is large and people drift into corners. Best for client events and parties above about 60. Watch out: prize quality. A table of branded pens is worse than no table.
- A day at the footy. June is mid-season, so unlike a December function you can actually build the event around a fixture. A corporate block beats a function room for a team that follows it. Best for 10 to 50 people who care. Watch out: the half who do not. This divides a room more than people expect.
- A volunteer morning, then lunch. Packing hampers or a food bank shift, then somewhere decent to eat. Teams coming off a hard year tend to respond to this better than to a party. Best for any size, booked well ahead. Watch out: making it feel compulsory. Offer the lunch to everyone and the morning to whoever wants it.
- The December party you never managed to book. Not a joke. Take the venue, the format and the budget you wanted last December, and run it in June when it is available and cheaper. Plenty of companies have quietly moved their main event to EOFY and never gone back. Best for teams whose December is always chaotic. Watch out: people expecting a Christmas party anyway. Say clearly that this is the main event of the year.
Why June is the easiest month to book
This is the part most people never think about. In the first three weeks of December, Melbourne venues, caterers and suppliers are effectively full by mid-November, prices are at their peak, and you take what is left.
In June none of that is true. Function rooms have availability, good suppliers are not turning work away, Friday nights are gettable, and the whole thing costs less for the same spend. We feel it from our side of it too, because December is the month we have to tell people no.
If your December is always a scramble, moving the main team event to EOFY is a genuinely good idea that very few companies seriously consider.
What to budget
Rough per-head figures to sanity-check a quote against rather than quote from.
Venue hire with basic catering typically starts around $60 to $90 a head and climbs quickly with anything premium, though June pricing tends to sit at the lower end of a venue range rather than the upper. Activities and entertainment are normally quoted per item rather than per head, which means they get cheaper per person as headcount grows. A single machine costs the same whether thirty people play it or a hundred and thirty.
If the budget is tight, the highest-return cut is almost always the venue rather than the activity. An office, a warehouse or a hall with something to do in it beats a nice restaurant where nothing happens.
A note on the spend itself
EOFY functions are often paid for out of a budget that disappears on 30 June, which is why they get booked in a hurry. Two practical consequences.
First, get the invoice dated correctly. If the spend needs to land in this financial year, say so when you book rather than after, because a deposit in June and a balance in July can split across two years.
Second, there are fringe benefits tax rules that apply to staff entertainment in Australia, and they can change what a function effectively costs you. We are not accountants and will not pretend otherwise. Ask yours before you commit a large number, particularly if you are deciding between a function and something like gift cards.
Format beats venue
Most functions get planned backwards: book a room, then work out what happens in it. Decide the format first and the venue choices narrow themselves.
The competition. A format with a winner, a leaderboard and a trophy that lives on someone’s desk until next year. Works unreasonably well for mixed teams, because competing is easier than small talk.
The roaming party. No seating plan, food circulating, people free to move. Works above about thirty, and for teams who do not all know each other.
The sit-down. Works for close teams under about twenty. Falls apart above that.
The activity-first. The event is the activity. Good when the team is new, or the year has been hard and nobody wants to stand around discussing it.
If you want our part of it
We deliver arcade machines to work functions across Melbourne, Sydney, Brisbane and Adelaide, with delivery, setup and pack-down included and ABN invoicing as standard. Machines can be wrapped in your branding, designed and printed in-house, which is worth knowing if the function doubles as an internal campaign.
June is the month we can say yes to almost anything, including the short notice this season runs on. See corporate event hire for the detail, or tell us about the function and we will come back the same day.