5 Data Points About Your Pharmacy You Need to Know

The quote “knowledge is power” has become a well-known saying since its origins in the 1500’s (or maybe earlier depending on who you ask). Although somewhat cliché, it’s certainly a truth that needs to be considered. Especially when it comes to our businesses. The simple fact is, the more you know about your pharmacy business, the more power you have to influence a positive change and succeed.  

You probably have a baseline for how your pharmacy operates. You know about how many cashiers and pharmacy technicians you need to staff each day. You know an average number of prescriptions you fill each day, and how much money your pharmacy earned each year. But it takes more than that to really see where any business is on a larger scale.  

Best sellers (and their counterparts) – Understanding where your pharmacy is succeeding and where there is room for improvement starts with product movement. Product Movement reports generated through your pharmacy POS system can help you identify what’s selling well and what just isn’t moving. You can run sales distribution reports to breakdown sales by category, fineline, department, and more to get a clear picture of sales trends in your pharmacy. This information will help you make key decisions about what products to stock more of and what it might make sense to dial back on or move to a different location within the store. 

Frequent shoppers – Customer Loyalty Programs do more than reward customers for shopping. They also help you identify who your most frequent and loyal customers are. What you do with that information is up to you. There are any number of options and opportunities, but it all starts with having that data available to you.  

Outstanding A/R balances- If you operate a house charge program, you need to be able to easily review outstanding balances. Being able to quickly identify past due accounts and act accordingly on those accounts means better cash flow and less work for you and your staff in the long run. 

Busiest times of the day- You may have a general idea of general foot traffic, but without specifics you may be wasting valuable resources by overstaffing or risk losing customers by understaffing. Monitoring transaction volume by day of the week and time of day helps you to understand when your pharmacy needs all hands on deck or when you can spare a clerk or two for special projects.  

Profits, margins, and more – Target margins and estimated profit percentages are great but they don’t mean much if you don’t have any way to monitor whether you are living up to those standards. You need to be able to easily see margins on products based on current data and see if there are items being sold outside of these set parameters or even below cost.  

Pharmacy point-of-sale makes it easy to access all of this data and more, giving you the indepth knowledge you need to make smart decisions and grow your pharmacy business.