What to do about inventory.

For a lot of us independents, keeping an appropriate inventory is quite possibly the most difficult thing, in practicality, to do. It's such a delicate balance between keeping just enough not to break the bank and disrupt cash flow and not keeping so little that you're owing a lot of people medicine and making them mad. I'm not going to say I'm an expert on it but I'll offer some hints/suggestions on how I manage it and you can see if it will work for you or not.

- One thing I do is go through the past 6 months (easy to do with most any filling software) and see how many people got something on the same day. One rule of thumb is with most non-fast moving drugs (ie. Bactrim, Lortab, HCTZ, etc.) you keep two 90 or 100 ct. bottles. But with certain drugs you might fill # 60 every day but that's still just enough that you just have to keep one bottle and a partial in stock at a time. In the rare event you fill more than that in the same day, it's okay to owe on it because it's worth playing the odds on that.

- Go through the last 6 months a find the people that get 90 day or huge amounts of drugs on a single day then write it on a calendar so you can order that much stock only when you need it. That may sound a little confusing so I'll try to use an example. We have a guy that gets #260 Uroquid-No. 2 Acid every month. But instead of immediately reordering all that stock the day after he gets his script filled we have a daily calendar that I flip ahead to a day or two before he should a need a refill and mark down to order that many back into stock. That way I'm not spending that money until I need to. The same can be done if you only have a small percentage of people who get 90-day supplies of drugs when most everyone else just gets 30. Get a daily calendar and flip ahead to mark down when their next fill should be and to get that much stock in. This should help spread out spending some money, especially on weeks that your bill is getting up there.

*Note: some filling software and/or your wholesaler might have programs that analyze your filling trends for you and help you do this with out so much of the work. Sometimes it costs a fee though so check it out.

-Mark your partials! I mark across partials with a Sharpee so I now when I have fulls and partials on the shelf. While we're trying to cut down on how much inventory we have we also don't want to never have anything when people need it. Nothing makes people want to switch more than always owing them and never having the drugs they need when they want them. Sometimes it's unavoidable but minimize it as much as you can. There's nothing worse than thinking you have enough medicine then finding out you don't. Also, make it a rule and hammer it into you and your staffs head that it's verboten to have two partials on the shelf. That'll screw you up even more.

Above all, pay attention to how much your ordering and be willing to put in the effort at the end of the day. That seems like that's a "duh" statement but I've seen too many people get lazy on it or not pay attention and get into a cash flow crunch and sometimes even close. Inventory is the single biggest expense in operating a pharmacy. And while it might only be small bits of savings here and there over a year it adds up.

Anyone else have any suggestions? We'd love you to share them.