Article · For pharmacies & distributors
Changing your pharmacy software: what happens to your data
Most owners who want to change their software do not, and the reason is almost never price. It is the fear of losing years of history, and of the shop standing still while somebody sorts it out. Both are reasonable fears. Here is what actually happens, based on how we have done it since 1996.
What comes across
All of it, in practice. Your masters — items, suppliers, customers — your parties, your current stock and your bill history all move to the new system.
Accounting data can come too, if you are able to give it to us in Excel. That is worth asking your present vendor about early, because it is the one part that depends on what they will release to you.
We also bring across four to five years of product stock history, including the supplier detail attached to it: which supplier, which bill number, which date. That sounds like housekeeping. It is not, and the next section is the reason.
Why the purchase history is worth more than the bills
Ask most people why they want their old data and they will say they would like to keep it. In a pharmacy the reason is harder than that: expiry and breakage returns depend on it.
To send expired or damaged stock back, you have to be able to show where it came from — the supplier, the bill number, the date it was purchased. If that history did not come across with the stock, the claim cannot be made, and the goods stop being returnable. They become a write-off instead.
This runs the entire length of the trade. A retailer returns to his stockist, the stockist to the distributor, the distributor to the C&F agent. Every step needs the purchase behind it. Break the chain at any point and somebody absorbs the loss, and it is usually whoever is holding the stock.
So when you are comparing what one vendor will migrate against another, this is the question that carries money with it. Not “will I keep my bills” but “will my stock still be returnable afterwards”.
We move your data twice, not once
This is the part that ought to settle the nerves.
We do not migrate your data once and hand you the result. We do it as a test first. You get the new system loaded with your own information, and you go through it — your item names, your rates, your parties, your stock figures, your history. You check the things you would notice and we would not.
Only when you are satisfied with the test do we take the final data across and go live.
Nobody is asked to trust a migration they have not seen. If something has come across wrongly, it is found on the test copy while your existing system is still running your shop, which is a completely different situation from finding it on a Monday morning with customers waiting.
How long your shop actually stands still
For a standalone pharmacy or a distributor, the changeover takes three to four hours.
For a chain or a larger multi-location business, we will not put a number on it before looking. We study your data first and then tell you, because guessing at that scale is how changeovers go wrong.
Billing does not stop for a day. It stops for a few hours. That is the honest answer, and it is the one most owners expect to be much worse.
The first ten days
Being straight about this matters more than promising a clean switch.
The changeover is hours. Getting the whole system running smoothly — every report the way you want it, every staff member comfortable, the small settings that are particular to your shop — takes around ten days.
What we watch during those ten days is that nothing is lost commercially. Sales and purchases are protected from day one. The system may still be settling, but your trade is not paying for it.
Anybody who tells you a full changeover is finished the same evening is describing the installation, not the business.
What we would ask of you
Two things, and neither takes long.
- Your accounting data in Excel, if your present vendor will give it to you. Ask for it before you give notice, not after.
- Somebody who genuinely knows your masters — usually you, sometimes the person at the counter. Half an hour of their attention on the test data is worth more than a week of ours.
If you have not decided yet
This article assumes you have already made up your mind to move. If you are still weighing it up, the more useful place to start is six things to check before you renew your pharmacy software — the questions worth asking of what you are running today, before you think about what to replace it with.
Ask us what your changeover would look like.
Tell us what you run today, how many counters, and whether it is one shop or several. We will tell you what would come across, what would not, and how many hours you would actually be down.