The key to financial management is ‘timeliness’
May 10, 2010
Tracking retail financial data enables
pharmacy owners and managers to
make decisions and control the
performance of the business.
Pharmacy has a myriad of data that
can be collected and analysed. It is
however useless unless the data can
be assembled into easy to read
reports in a timely manner.
The fundamentals of financial
reporting are the profit and loss,
balance sheet and funds flow (where
the money went) report.
Getting quality data into the
accounting system to provide quick
easy to read reports is paramount.
To achieve this you need to
automate such things at the
importation of point of sale data
(daily sales, customer, script and
items numbers) and reconciliation of
the monthly supplier statements.
Once the source information is in
the accounting system, you need to
make sure the closing stock values
and amounts owed by customers
and the Government are entered.
Without these amounts, the profit
result will be meaningless.
The reports should be tailored for
your pharmacy and be
understandable. For example, if you
operate traditional service structures
you must have a tool that
consolidates the results.
The profit and loss must show the
following items: Dispensary sales;
Dispensary gross profit; Retail sales;
Retail gross profit; Advertising; Rent;
and Professional & non-professional
wages. Running the reports monthly
or quarterly is imperative because
the retail environment is flat and
there are impacts from the 5th CPA.
Add to this the recently announced
$2bn in savings the Government
wants from manufacturers, some of
which will be passed onto pharmacy
and you should be looking at where
improvements can be made in the
pharmacy. Remember, reducing
costs is only part of the answer!
This week’s contributor is Norman
Thurecht from JR Pharmacy Services.
Norman Thurecht is an
expert in pharmacy
finances, having been
with JR Accountants’
Pharmacy Division
since 2003. More info
nthurecht@jr.com.au.
The above article was sent to subscribers in Pharmacy Daily's issue from 10 May 10To see the full newsletter, see the embedded issue below or CLICK HERE to download Pharmacy Daily from 10 May 10
