Pharmacy stock control for clinics that aren't pharmacies

Plenty of Indian clinics dispense. Not as a business line — as a convenience, so the patient does not have to walk to a chemist for a five-day course of antibiotics.

The trouble is that a dispensary attached to a clinic carries the same obligations as a standalone pharmacy, while typically being run by whoever is free, tracked in a notebook, and reviewed when something runs out.

The three failures, in order of cost

Expiry. Money is thrown away in small amounts, continuously, in a way nobody notices because no single loss is large. A clinic that discovers expiry only when a strip is picked up and read is losing stock at the tail of every batch it buys.

Stockouts of the fast movers. The twenty molecules that account for most of what you dispense are the ones that run out, because they run out fastest and get reordered by memory.

The Schedule H1 register. Not a money problem — a compliance one, and the one that turns into a real problem during an inspection.

Batch and expiry are one field, not two

The single change that fixes the expiry problem is tracking stock by batch, not by molecule.

"Amoxicillin 500 — 240 units" is not usable information. "Amoxicillin 500, batch A2291, 90 units, expires 11/2026" is, because it can be sorted, alerted on, and dispensed against oldest-first.

Three rules follow:

• Dispense first-expiring-first, automatically. If the person dispensing has to look this up, it will not happen on a busy afternoon.
• Alert on a horizon, not on the date. A warning at 90 days is actionable — you can slow reordering, or return to the distributor if your terms allow. A warning on the day of expiry is a write-off notice.
• Reconcile physically once a month. Software counts what it was told about. Only a physical count finds the discrepancy, and the size of that discrepancy is a fair measure of how disciplined the dispensary actually is.

Reorder levels beat reorder instincts

For each item, set two numbers: a reorder level and a reorder quantity. When stock falls below the level, it goes on the order list automatically.

Getting the level roughly right takes one calculation — average daily dispensing, multiplied by the supplier's lead time in days, plus a buffer. For a fast mover dispensing 12 units a day with a four-day lead time, a reorder level around 70 gives you comfortable margin.

You do not need this for every line. Twenty items usually account for the large majority of dispensing volume. Set levels for those and manage the long tail by eye.

The Schedule H1 obligation

Drugs in Schedule H1 require a separate register recording the prescriber's details, the patient's details, the drug and the quantity supplied — retained for three years.

This is a paper obligation that a lot of clinic dispensaries meet unevenly, and it is the first thing an inspection asks for. If your software knows which items are H1, it can generate this register as a by-product of dispensing rather than as a separate act of clerical discipline. That is the difference between a register that is complete and one that is written up from memory on a Saturday.

Schedule H and H1 both require dispensing against a valid prescription by a registered pharmacist. A clinic dispensary that is not staffed by a registered pharmacist has a problem that no software will solve.

GST and billing

Medicines carry GST, and a dispensary invoice is a tax invoice. Two things worth getting right:

• HSN codes per item, set once at the point the item is created, not typed at billing.
• Rate applied automatically from the item, so the person billing cannot pick the wrong slab under pressure.

If your clinic bills consultation and medicines on one invoice, the two are taxed differently. That distinction should live in the software.

What good looks like

A dispensary in reasonable shape can answer four questions in under a minute:

1. What is expiring in the next 90 days?
2. What is below reorder level right now?
3. What did we dispense last month, by value?
4. Show me the H1 register for March.

If any of those takes an afternoon of counting, that is the gap.