Nobody opens a clinic to manage inventory. It gets attention twice: on the Friday something runs out mid-treatment, and on the day somebody notices a shelf of expired stock that was paid for a year ago.
Both failures come from the same gap — nobody knows what is there without walking to the cupboard. The fix is not a warehouse system. It is counting the few things worth counting, and ignoring the rest on purpose.
Count the few things that matter
A clinic stocks hundreds of lines and perhaps twenty of them justify being tracked. The other lines are cheap, quick to replace, and the effort of tracking them costs more than the occasional emergency trip.
An item is worth tracking if any one of these is true.
- It is expensive. Implants, injectables, anything where a single unit is a real number.
- Running out cancels an appointment. The cost is not the item, it is the empty slot and the patient who now has to come back.
- It expires. Anything with a date is money with a deadline on it.
- It is slow to arrive. A week's lead time turns a small miscount into a fortnight of saying no.
Write the list of tracked items down and keep it short. A stock system nobody updates is worse than no stock system, because it produces numbers people act on and the numbers are wrong.
The money sitting on the shelf
Most clinics underestimate this, because it accumulated one delivery at a time. It is worth valuing once, properly, before deciding how much effort stock deserves.
Example
An aesthetics clinic, one afternoon's count
- Injectables and fillers: 140 units at €95 average = €13,300
- Consumables and disposables: roughly €2,400
- Skincare held for resale: €5,100
- Total on the shelf: about €20,800
- Of which €3,600 expires within four months
That last line is the one that changes behaviour. It is not a stock figure, it is a deadline — and it usually arrives as a surprise the first time anybody adds it up.
Reorder points that survive a busy week
A reorder point is the quantity at which you order more. Setting it to "when it looks low" is what produces the Friday problem, because what looks low on a quiet week is empty on a busy one.
reorder point = (average weekly use × lead time in weeks) + bufferExample
A dental practice, composite
- Average use: 12 units a week
- Supplier lead time: 2 weeks
- 12 × 2 = 24 units used while the order travels
- Buffer for a busy fortnight: 8
- Reorder point: 32 units
Set the buffer from your worst recent fortnight rather than your average one. The average is the case the formula already covers; the buffer exists for the case it does not.
Recheck reorder points after any change in what the clinic does — a new clinician, a new treatment, a seasonal peak. A reorder point set for last year's workload is the most common cause of a shortage in a clinic that thought it had solved this.
Expiry, oldest first
Two rules cover most of it, and both are about the physical cupboard rather than any system.
- New deliveries go behind, never in front. Ninety per cent of expiry waste is somebody reaching for the nearest box.
- Check dates on a schedule, not when you remember. Monthly, on a fixed day, on the items that expire — not the whole cupboard.
When something is a couple of months out, you still have options: use it first on suitable cases, move it to a busier branch, or accept the loss early while it is still small. All three beat finding it expired.
What a count actually tells you
Count the tracked items monthly, and compare against what the system says should be there. The gap is the useful part. A recurring gap is not carelessness — it is a process that does not match the shelf.
| What the gap looks like | Usually means |
|---|---|
| One item, one large gap | A delivery or a usage never recorded |
| Many items, small gaps | Consumption recorded per treatment, not per unit used |
| A gap that grows each month | A step in the day nobody is recording at all |
| Stock the system says is negative | Deliveries logged after the treatments that used them |
Fix the process the gap points at rather than adjusting the number. Adjusting the number makes the report agree with the shelf until next month, when it disagrees again by the same amount.
Buying in another currency
Common the moment you order from abroad, and quietly distorting if you record only the price you were charged. A box bought at one exchange rate and used three months later at another was not worth what you paid for it — and if you price treatments from stock cost, that difference lands in your margin without appearing anywhere.
Record the original currency, the amount, and the rate on the day of purchase. Valuing the shelf in your own currency then stays meaningful, and the difference between what you paid and what it is worth becomes visible instead of being absorbed.
What this looks like in practice
- List the twenty or so items worth tracking, using the four tests above.
- Count them once, properly, and value the shelf.
- Set a reorder point for each, from real usage and real lead times.
- Record deliveries when they arrive and usage when it happens, not in a weekly catch-up.
- Count monthly, and treat every recurring gap as a process to fix.
- Check expiry dates on a fixed day each month.
That is the whole discipline. It costs about an hour a month once it is running, and the hour is repaid by the first cancelled appointment it prevents.
Common questions
- Do we need stock software, or is a spreadsheet enough?
- A spreadsheet handles the counting and the reorder points perfectly well. Where it breaks is usage: somebody has to remember to open it and subtract what was used, and in a busy clinic that is the step that stops happening. If your gaps come from unrecorded usage rather than bad arithmetic, software helps; if they come from arithmetic, it will not.
- How often should we count?
- Monthly for tracked items is enough for most clinics, plus a count of the expensive lines whenever something looks wrong. Counting everything quarterly sounds lighter and is actually worse — a three-month-old gap is much harder to explain than a one-month-old one.
- How do we value stock when we paid different prices for it?
- Weighted average is the workable answer for a clinic: total paid divided by total units, updated as deliveries arrive. It is less precise than tracking each batch to its own invoice and it does not require anyone to identify which box a unit came out of, which is the reason batch-level tracking usually stops working within a month.
- Should stock be tracked per branch?
- Yes, if you have more than one. A combined figure will tell you there are plenty when in fact they are all at the other site, and the treatment is booked here. Per branch also makes it possible to move stock towards its expiry date rather than losing it.
Read next
The cupboard, counted as you work.
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