The back room works when it can
It's half past nine, there's a queue at the counter, and out the back the wholesaler's driver is unloading the boxes with the delivery notes on top
Someone leaves a customer halfway through, signs, puts the notes on the table and goes back to the counter, because the counter comes before everything
Those notes stay there until midday, or until the shutters come down, and when someone finally picks them up they're tired, they're in a hurry, and they book the goods in with one eye on the clock
That's exactly where the mistakes are born, not from carelessness but from the time of day, and you find them weeks later, when a stock figure doesn't add up or a batch turns out to be where it isn't
What eats the hours, out the back
- The orders to the wholesalers, which are mostly the same products as always, checked over by hand every time
- The delivery notes to book in, line by line, with supplier codes that don't always match yours
- The comparison between what you ordered, what actually arrived and what you get invoiced for, which often nobody sees through to the end because there's no time
- The expiry dates and the batches to keep an eye on, with the rounds of the shelves done from memory
- The returns and the missing items, to note down, to remember, to chase up
- The supplier documents to file, always PDFs, always with a different name
Nothing hard about any of it, they're steps you could do with your eyes shut, the trouble is that there are a lot of them and you do them in the scraps of time between one customer and the next
Examples of what the system can do
These are examples of jobs the system can do, not jobs already delivered, Muffin Suite started recently and we'd rather tell you now than later
- It reads the wholesaler's delivery note, PDF or Excel, pulls out codes, quantities, batches and expiry dates, and prepares the goods receipt in the business software you already use, with the conversion table between the supplier's codes and yours
- It compares the order with the delivery note and with the invoice, line by line, and sets aside for you only the lines where the three documents don't say the same thing
- It prepares the proposed order from the stock levels and the rules you give it, then leaves it there, you look at it and you send it
- It pulls out the list of batches coming up to their expiry date, as far ahead as you decide, so you ask for the returns while there's still time
- It logs into the wholesalers' portals with your credentials, downloads the documents and files them with the naming and the folder you use
You don't have to replace the pharmacy's business software, and your program doesn't need any technical integration to the outside, the system opens the screens and fills in the fields the way a person would, and that's the house specialty
What stays with you
The choices are all still yours, what to order and how much, what to send back to the wholesaler and what to keep on the shelf a while longer
The system does the mechanical steps and stops when something doesn't add up, a code it doesn't recognize it doesn't invent, it sets it aside and shows it to you
At the start it's worth keeping it on a short rein, with more checks and more confirmations, then you widen it on the cases you have already seen work
Why it's worth it
The hours that go into booking in the delivery notes today go back to the counter, which is the only place a pharmacy really earns
And checking ordered against delivered against invoiced stops being something you do when you can, because a machine is as careful at line two hundred as it was at line one, while a person isn't, and that's only natural
We agree the monthly fee before we start, that figure stays and you approve every addition yourself, if you want an idea of what those hours weigh there's the savings calculation, otherwise write to me and we'll talk