Stock value in pharmacy – Why is it more important than stock audit?

Stock value in pharmacy – Why is it more important than a stock audit?

Are you running a hospital with a pharmacy?

Then this is for you.

If you have a hospital but have outsourced your pharmacy – we feel pity for you!!! coz that’s the most profitable entity in a hospital.

Stock audits are something you would have done at a point during your times, some quite often, some very rare. If you haven’t done it ever, stop reading this now and go do one right away.

Recommend you to figure that out on your own, as the intent of this blog is not that.

Stock value refers to the purchase value of your products (drugs & consumables) at any point of time in your store, OT, pharmacy all put together. Now this refers to the amount you have already spent in procuring the same. Let’s assume this amount to be 10 lacs (for example) for the sake of discussion.

What relevance does this have??

Let’s take 2 case scenarios.

1. Assuming a monthly sales of 5 lacs (in terms of the purchase value and not MRP)
2. Assuming a monthly sales of 20 lacs

Although the stock value (volume) is the same in both scenarios,

case 1 signifies that 2 months of stock is lying at any point of time, however, it’s only 15 days of stock in scenario no 2. As you may be aware the filling time for most pharma products is 12-24 hrs and that of consumables is max 2-3 days with some exceptions.

With the filling area being so quick, what would anyone have to stock for 2 months unless otherwise they are life-saving and may be needed in hyper-emergency we just invented this word  situations. In fact, even 15 days is long.

So what?!
What’s wrong with having a higher stock value?
Doesn’t it reduce the burden of frequent ordering?

Might sound like a great question, but isn’t!!!

Why throw money into a storeroom, that’s prone to mishaps, when it could have stayed in an FD/mutual fund/other investments and continue to grow. And the lesser the value of a stock, the better the management of the products, less prone to expiry or becoming a non-moving stock (will discuss about this at a later date). But this requires efficient ordering practices to ensure a proper re-filling to avoid stock-outs.

However, your so-called efficient staff would love to have more and more, that the store is ever over-flowing, which is nothing but your hard-earned money.