Pharmacy Management Software in Bangladesh: Batches, Expiry and Real Profit

Ask a pharmacy owner in Dhaka where the money goes and you will rarely hear 'theft'. You will hear about the carton found at the back of the shelf three months past its date, and about the month that looked profitable until the supplier's bill was paid. Both are accounting problems before they are stock problems, and both are invisible to software that treats medicine as a single number on hand.

One number on hand is not stock

A shop holding 240 tablets of a common antibiotic does not hold one thing. It holds three or four batches, bought at different times, at different prices, expiring in different months. Software that stores 240 cannot answer the only two questions that matter: which of those tablets should leave the shop next, and what did the ones you just sold actually cost you?

Batch-wise stock stores each intake separately with its own expiry date and its own cost. Once that is true, selling nearest-expiry-first stops being a discipline the counter has to remember and becomes something the software does on its own. The strips that would have died on the shelf go out first, in the ordinary course of trade, without anyone checking dates.

Expiry control is a hard rule or it is nothing

Every system claims expiry tracking. The question to ask a vendor is narrower: can a member of staff sell an expired strip if they try? Not by accident — deliberately, by picking that batch, or by putting a returned strip back on the shelf after its date has passed.

If the answer is 'there is a warning', the control is advisory and someone will click through it on a busy evening. It should not be possible at all. A warning belongs earlier — a configurable number of days before expiry, so you can move the slow-moving stock while it is still worth something. A shop turning over fast might want 15 days' notice; one carrying specialist lines might want 90. That is a setting, not a fixed rule.

The deal purchase that quietly overstates your profit

Almost no medicine in Bangladesh is bought at list price. It is bought as 10 + 1 free, with a further discount on the bill, sometimes with a second discount on the line. Here is where most software gets the arithmetic wrong.

Say you buy 10 boxes at ৳100 each, get 1 box free, and the supplier takes ৳200 off the bill. You paid ৳800 for 11 boxes — 1,100 tablets. That is ৳0.7273 a tablet. Software that records the cost as ৳100 a box, or ৳1.00 a tablet, will overstate your cost of goods on every single sale from that stock, and understate your gross profit by about 27%. Owners then make pricing decisions against a number that was never true.

• Free goods must enter stock at no extra cost but must lower the per-unit cost of the whole batch.
• A discount on the bill changed what the goods cost, so it has to reach the batches — not sit on the document.
• The cost used for a sale must be the cost of the batch it came from, snapshotted at the moment of sale.

That last point matters more than it looks. Batch costs change with every purchase. If the system recalculates the cost of past sales using today's cost, last month's profit figure changes every time you buy — and a report you cannot reproduce is a report you cannot trust.

Selling the way the shop actually speaks

You buy a box of ten strips. A customer asks for three tablets. Any software that cannot take that sale without mental arithmetic will be worked around within a week, and the stock figure will drift from the shelf.

The fix is to store everything in single units and convert at the edges. Enter purchases in boxes, sell in tablets, and read stock back as strips and boxes. Sell three from a full box of 10×10 and the shelf should say 9 strips + 7 — not 97, and certainly not 0.97 boxes.

A pharmacy is not only medicine

Gauze, syringes, gloves, cotton, a BP machine, baby food, cosmetics. These are a real share of the counter and none of them exist in any drug database. Software built strictly around a medicine catalogue forces these into fake drug records, or leaves them out of stock control entirely, which means they are out of your profit figure too.

Medicines should come from a proper catalogue so brand, strength and pack are right. Everything else you should be able to name yourself — one at a time, or by importing a spreadsheet — and it should then behave identically: batches, expiry, barcodes, selling and reporting.

Questions worth asking a vendor

• Show me two batches of the same medicine with different expiry dates. Which one does a sale take from, and can I override it?
• Enter a 10 + 1 free purchase with a discount on the bill. What per-unit cost lands on the batch?
• Sell three tablets from a full box. What does the stock figure read afterwards?
• Add a box of surgical gloves. How many screens does it take, and does it appear in the stock valuation?
• Cancel yesterday's sale. Does the stock come back, does the payment record survive, and does the money leave the income report?
• If two staff sell the last strip at the same moment, what happens?

The last one is unglamorous and it is the one most systems fail. Two cashiers, one remaining strip, both screens showing it as available. Without a lock on the stock row inside the sale transaction, both sales succeed and the shop is short. It never shows up in a demo and it shows up in a real shop within a month.

What it should cost

Pharmacy software in Bangladesh is sold anywhere from a one-off licence with a per-visit support charge, to a monthly subscription. The subscription is usually the safer purchase for a single shop: no server to buy, no version to fall behind on, and support that does not arrive as a separate invoice. SihatSuite prices the pharmacy module at ৳1,250 a month, standalone for a medicine shop or attached to a diagnostic centre subscription, with no setup fee and a free trial before you pay.

Whatever you choose, judge it on the three things above: does it hold stock by batch, is expiry a hard rule, and does a deal purchase produce a cost you would defend to your accountant. Everything else in a pharmacy system is convenience. Those three are the money.

Related resources

• Pharmacy management software
• What diagnostic software costs
• SihatSuite pricing