Where Cash Leaks in a Pharmacy — Five Holes and How to Plug Them
A pharmacy rarely loses money in one dramatic moment. It loses money in drips: a strip expiring here, an unwritten baki there, a drawer that’s “more or less” right. Each drip is too small to chase. Together they’re the difference between a shop that grows and a shop that just runs.
Leak 1: Stock that dies on the shelf
Every expired strip is money you paid a supplier, held for months, and then threw away — often when it could have been returned to the supplier while it still had value, if only someone had noticed in time. In a shop with thousands of SKUs, nobody notices in time by walking the shelves.
Month by month: how many products are expiring, how many units, and what
that stock is worth. The plug is simple — see it coming.
The plug: a screen that watches every batch’s expiry date for you, so near-expiry stock becomes a supplier return or a fast-moving shelf promotion instead of a write-off.
Leak 2: The baki that never got written
Credit given in a busy moment and recorded nowhere is a gift, not a debt. Fifty taka at a time, across a neighborhood, across a year — this is routinely a pharmacy’s largest invisible loss, precisely because each instance is too small to feel.
The plug: dues recorded inside the sale itself, against the customer’s name, at checkout. If it was sold, it’s either paid or on their statement. There is no third state. (We wrote a whole post on this: Customer baki without losing money.)
Leak 3: Paying suppliers from memory
When dues live as a blurry per-company total, the supplier’s ledger wins every dispute, old memos hide behind new ones, and you quietly overpay. The fix — dues tracked per invoice, settled oldest-first — is its own post too.
The plug: never argue from a notebook again; you and the rep look at the same list of invoices.
Leak 4: The drawer that’s “more or less” right
If the till is counted rarely, casually, or by the same person who ran it, small differences vanish into “more or less.” Most of it is honest — wrong change under pressure, a forgotten personal loan from the drawer — but honest leaks drain the same as dishonest ones, and the ambiguity is unfair to good staff.
The plug: the register should say what the drawer should hold — because every sale, payment method by payment method, went through it — so the end-of-shift count is a comparison, not an estimate. Differences surface the same evening they happen, attached to a shift, not to a month of suspicion.
Leak 5: Stock the records believe in but the shelf doesn’t have
Breakage, miscounted deliveries, the strip that fell behind the fridge — over time, the register drifts from reality. The gap is invisible until a physical count, and if counts are rare, the gap is large and its causes long forgotten.
The plug: regular partial counts against the system’s numbers, with every difference recorded as a stock adjustment and valued in taka. When the loss has a number, it gets managed; while it’s a vague feeling, it doesn’t.
The pattern
Notice what all five plugs have in common: none of them requires working harder. They require the information to exist — batch expiry dates, dues inside the sale, invoices instead of totals, a drawer expectation, a valued count. That’s what a system like medipharma24 actually sells: not software, but the end of “more or less.”
The proof shows up in the books. Plug the leaks and the balance sheet — stock value, cash, receivables, payables — starts describing a tighter ship:
Everything the shop owns and owes, valued, on one page. Leaks show up
here first — and so does plugging them.
This is part of a series for pharmacy owners: Are you actually making money? · The supplier khata · Customer baki · the full tour.