Take guesswork out of Drugstore Inventory Audits with BoxHero

Managing pharmaceutical inventory in a pharmacy, clinic, or physician’s office can be very challenging to implement. There are lots of regulated substances, generic drugs without barcode labels, as well as different types of medical devices and supplements people purchase on a daily basis.

Pharmaceutical inventory control is particularly vulnerable and potentially costly because you carry and dispense tightly regulated substances as well as expensive brand-name drugs with expiration. Specifically, cases like unexpected returns, theft, or diversion by employees can always result in losses of inventory, fines for regulatory non-compliance, and, potentially, forfeiture of your license.

Ideally, the inventory management system should be customizable as different drugstores have different inventory needs and customers’ demands. For example, the needs of ambulatory pharmacies will differ from those of retail or supermarket pharmacies that offer a wide assortment of personal care and beauty products, as well as general merchandise like snacks and groceries. Thus, the need for customizable inventory management systems has been growing very quickly as pharmacy operations and services evolve over time.

For all these reasons, choosing the right inventory management system is the key to success, and an efficient inventory audit feature is a must-have for the system as inventory audit can be a very tricky day-to-day job in pharmacies.

Now, let BoxHero’s customizable inventory audit feature help your business not only with identifying the diversion of controlled drugs and high-value medications but with optimizing inventories of a wide range of products from different categories. Its simple but efficient inventory audit feature will surpass your expectations and satisfy your unique business needs.

But first, you need to understand what a stock audit is and why it is so crucial in every business.

1. What is inventory audit & why you need it?

It refers to the cross-checking process to ensure that financial records match a company's inventory records and that the records align with a physical inventory count in the warehouse.

If there is a mismatch across the records, should you find the reason for diversion or errors, and adjust the records accordingly to minimize the confusion and potential loss of revenue.

2. Types of inventory audit

a. Regular stock audits

You can conduct audits once a year, or once a quarter/month. The disadvantage of conducting regular inventory checks is that it is difficult to pinpoint the reason for errors since you cannot exactly identify when and where they occurred, thus making it even harder to improve the inventory control system.

b. Circular stock audits

You can customize how often you conduct the audit on a regular cycle depending on the products’ characteristics: Annually, biannually, quarterly, monthly, weekly, or even daily. Different products require different degrees of attention and control and have different expiration dates, so it is better to perform individual stock audits periodically depending on the products’ importance and need. Most of the time, this is done by skilled professionals, making it easy to pinpoint the cause of the error. Also, as it can be carried out periodically without the closure of the business, it helps maintain a certain level of inventory accuracy.

3. What are the potential problems from inaccurate inventory audits?

• It causes confusion and delay in the supply chain, production plan, and other sales activities.
• It eventually leads to a higher level of minimum safety stocks, resulting in increased warehouse fees and inventory stocking cost.

Make Inventory audit easy-breezy with BoxHero!

Controlling inventory and performing audits is crucial but painstaking, particularly for businesses like pharmacies and clinics where there is a wide range of different medicines and product categories to manage.  Now, you can use BoxHero’s stock audit feature to breeze out the process.

The seamless user interface and useful features in BoxHero help you optimize medicine inventory and asset management through auto-generated inventory analysis. Here are some of the most wanted features beyond the stock audit function BoxHero provides for quick and easy inventory management:

• Assigns products into different categories by volume usage, manufacturer, article name, manufacturing number, etc. by customizing the category feature

• Provides auto-generated sales & inventory analysis features to assign reorder points and optimize the safety stock level

• Barcode generator/scanner and label printing functions allow for easy and accurate inventory audits.

• Multi-store / multi-location feature makes inventory management easy and synced across multiple locations.