Ask an owner how much stock is in the shop and you will get a number. Ask how much of it will still be sellable in three months and the answer changes shape: a pause, a glance at a shelf, and a guess. The gap between those two answers is where the money goes.
A pharmacy does not hold products, it holds batches
You do not have forty of something. You have twelve that arrived in March, cost one price and expire next spring, and twenty-eight that arrived in July, cost slightly more and expire in September. They sit in the same box on the same shelf and they are not the same stock. One is worth what you paid for it. The other is a write-off with a date on it.
A system that tracks a product total cannot tell you which is which, and neither can the shelf. That is the whole argument for recording stock at the batch — the product, the batch number, the expiry date and the branch it is in — rather than at the product.
What that makes possible
- A list instead of a discovery. What expires inside the next thirty, sixty and ninety days becomes a question you ask, not a stocktake you survive. You read it on a quiet morning rather than finding it when a customer points at a date.
- Selling the older batch first. When the counter suggests a batch it suggests the one that dies soonest, so the shelf rotates itself instead of depending on whose hand reaches into the box.
- A claim you can actually make. Most suppliers will take back or credit short-dated stock if you ask in time and can say which batch and how many. Two months before the date that is a conversation. Two weeks after it, it is a bin.
- Honest valuation. What the stock is worth is the sum of what each batch cost, not the product's current price multiplied by a count. Those two numbers drift a long way apart when prices have moved.
Getting the dates in without a bad week
The objection is always the same: entering expiry dates for everything on the shelf sounds like a fortnight of typing. It is much less than that if you do it in the right order.
Start at goods receipt. From today, every box that comes in gets its batch and date entered once, at the moment somebody is already holding the carton and reading it. That costs seconds, and it means the problem stops growing.
Then work backwards through what is already on the shelf, fastest-moving first. The items you sell every day will turn over and correct themselves within weeks whatever you do, so that is not where the value is. The value is in the slow lines — the ones that have sat there long enough that you have stopped seeing them. There are fewer of those than you think, and they are the ones that get thrown away.
Anything you genuinely cannot date, record without a date and let it sell down. A partly complete record is useful the day you start it. A perfect record you never finish is not.
What to watch once it is running
Two numbers are worth reading every month. The first is what you wrote off, in taka, and whether it is falling. The second is how much of the ninety-day list you cleared before it became the thirty-day list — because the point is not to see expiry coming, it is to do something about it while a supplier will still take it back or a discount will still shift it.
Shops that get this right usually find the same thing. The write-off number drops quickly over the first few months and then settles, and what remains is mostly genuinely slow stock rather than forgotten stock. That remainder is a buying problem, not a tracking problem, and it is a far easier one to fix.
Try it on your own shelves
Farmasale ties every quantity to a batch and an expiry date, and the expiry list is on the first screen you see. The trial runs seven days, needs no card, and we bring your existing stock list across for you.