5 Things That Can Throw Your Pharmacy Off Balance

Two weeks ago I woke up, attempted to get out of bed and promptly fell on my face. While I’m not what you’d call graceful, this kind of clumsiness is definitely uncharacteristic. A trip to the doctor’s revealed that I had an ear infection, which was doing all sorts of nasty things to my equilibrium.

While I knew that ear infections could cause balance problems and dizziness, I’d never actually experienced it for myself. I was a bit surprised that something that seemed to be impacting me so little in every other way was throwing me off of my game so much.

There are so many working pieces that keep us balanced. Both physically, in our personal lives and in our businesses. In your pharmacy, there are dozens of seemingly small or unconnected things that can throw your entire pharmacy business out of balance if you aren’t careful.

Out of Date Pricing – If your pricing isn’t up to date, you are likely losing money. Either costs have gone up, leaving margins woefully thin, or prices have gone down, meaning that your competitors are probably outselling you. Use automatic price updates, processed directly from vendors through your point-of-sale system to keep costs and pricing up to date.

Inaccurate Inventory – Not knowing what’s on your shelves is a big problem. If you don’t have accurate inventory, you don’t know what’s selling and what’s not. You could be running out of best sellers or wasting valuable shelf space with items that just aren’t moving. Using inventory management through your pharmacy point-of-sale system to track sales, understand shrinkage and automate ordering.

Lack of Accountability – Employees are a big part of the success of your pharmacy. Understanding their performance and isolating issues is a necessity for a well managed pharmacy. Use biometric login to make sure that all employees have unique access so you can track who does what. Add dual drawer functionality so overages and shortages in your cash drawer can be more easily tracked. Take advantage of trust levels that allow you to control what system features any employee has access to.

Not backing up your systems – Disaster preparedness is an important topic for any business. And nothing can throw you off your game quite like an unexpected system failure (for any reason) if you have no way to recover your data. Set up your point-of-sale systems to automatically back up data each night, and keep those backups in a secure spot so that you can always restore a recent copy of all your pharmacy POS data.

Neglecting Security – Security is always a concern. A virus on a pharmacy PC or other form of cyber attack can be detrimental to your pharmacy business. Keeping anti-virus software up to date and making sure OS systems and other applications are regularly patched will help to protect you from a possible worst case scenario.

While none of these things are seemingly related in cause or effect, they all have the potential to do major damage to the balance, efficiency and success of your pharmacy if ignored. Luckily, a good pharmacy point-of-sale system can help you to keep on top of all these key areas and more.