Article · For pharmacies & distributors
Six things to check before you renew your pharmacy software
The renewal invoice arrives once a year, and most owners pay it the way they pay the electricity bill — without reading it. Twenty minutes of checking is worth more than the signature. Here is what we would look at, drawn from thirty years of moving pharmacies and distributors onto new systems.
1. Can you get your own data out?
Some pharmacy systems keep their data in a closed, encrypted format that only that software can read. This works perfectly well — right up to the day you want to do something else with it.
Suppose you decide to sell online, or take orders on WhatsApp, or connect a delivery service, or let your accountant pull figures out directly. Every one of those needs a developer to read your stock, your prices and your customers. If the data is locked, none of it is possible, and no amount of paying will unlock it.
Most owners never think about this, because it stays invisible until the moment it matters. Then they find the decision was made years ago, by somebody else.
How to check: ask your vendor, in writing, whether an outside developer can read your database directly. A clear yes or no tells you a great deal, and so does a vague answer.
We run on Microsoft SQL Server, which any competent developer can work with. That is also why our own WhatsApp ordering system can read live stock and price straight from the counter.
2. What are you actually paying in a year?
Add it up properly rather than glancing at the renewal figure: the licence, the AMC, anything charged per counter or per user, and the extras — e-invoicing, e-way bills, an additional branch, a report somebody built for you once and charged for.
Then ask what the AMC actually buys. It is reasonable when it brings statutory updates, real support and new versions. It is less reasonable when the number rises every year and nothing about the software changes.
How to check: put last year’s total on paper, not just the renewal invoice. Owners are often surprised, because the money leaves in pieces across twelve months and never arrives as one figure.
3. How long does it take to get help when billing stops?
This is the complaint we hear more than any other, and it usually comes in the same words: nobody attends for days, you are put in a call queue, and then the line gets disconnected.
It matters more in a pharmacy than almost anywhere else. A shop that cannot bill is losing money every minute the counter is stuck, and “your ticket has been raised” is no answer at six in the evening with a queue of customers waiting.
How to check: think about your last three support requests. How many days did each actually take? Not what the contract promises — what happened.
We run support on a single number. You send a message to it and the request is logged automatically, so nothing depends on somebody happening to pick up a phone. There is no queue to sit in and no call to be cut off. We come back as quickly as we can, and nothing logged during our office hours is left unattended.
4. Can you see all your shops in one place?
If you run more than one counter, or more than one shop, the real question is whether the system treats them as one business or as several separate ones.
One business means stock at your second shop visible from the first, one set of item and party masters instead of three that slowly drift apart, and consolidated figures without somebody exporting spreadsheets and merging them by hand.
Some systems handle each location as an island. That is workable with two shops and genuinely painful with five.
How to check: from your main counter, try to see live stock at another branch. If you cannot, you have your answer.
5. Does it still run fast as your data grows?
“It hangs during billing” is the single most common thing we are told, and it is rarely the computer’s fault.
Older systems were designed when a pharmacy held a fraction of the data it holds now. Add a decade of bills, several counters billing at the same moment, and batch-wise stock across thousands of items, and the design begins to show. It does not fail outright. It just gets slower every year, and everybody in the shop quietly adjusts to it.
Newer systems sit on a proper database engine built for exactly this. Ours runs on Microsoft SQL Server, which is designed for many people writing at once and for data that keeps growing.
How to check: does billing hang more often than it did two years ago? If your data grew and your speed fell, that is the design talking, not your hardware. Buying a faster computer will buy you about a year.
6. Can you reach it from outside the shop?
Some owners want everything on a machine they can see in the shop. Others want to check figures from home, or while travelling, or from a second town. Neither is wrong — but you should be the one choosing.
Ours runs either way, on a local server in your shop or on the cloud, and that choice can change later without starting again.
What to do with the answers
If your software passed all six, renew it and think no more about it. That is a good position, and plenty of businesses are in it.
If it failed one, raise that one with your vendor. Vendors respond to specific questions far better than to general dissatisfaction.
If it failed four or more — particularly the first and the third — then you are paying an annual fee for something that is quietly deciding what your business is allowed to do next. That is worth a conversation, with us or with anybody.
And if you have already decided to move, the next thing worth reading is what actually happens to your data when you change pharmacy software — what carries across, what it means for your expiry returns, and how many hours you are really down.
Not sure where you stand?
Tell us what you are running today and what it does at your counter. We have moved a great many pharmacies and distributors across since 1996, and we will tell you plainly whether it is worth your while.