How much stock should a pharmacy keep of one product?

Enough to cover the delivery time PLUS the wait until the next order, not the delivery time alone. If you order weekly and delivery takes five days, the boxes arriving on Friday have to last until the next lot lands — twelve days of cover, not five. Sizing to the delivery is why a shop is out of stock every Thursday.

Why does a shop that keeps running out keep ordering too little?

Because an empty shelf sells nothing, and a day with no sales looks like a day with no demand. Averaging those days in says demand fell, so the next order is smaller, so it runs out sooner. Each cycle makes it worse. Days you were out of stock have to be left out of the calculation.

Should a pharmacy buy in bulk to get a better unit price?

Only up to what can be sold before it expires. A hardware shop can hold two years of stock and lose nothing but the cash; medicine that outlives its shelf life is a guaranteed loss and, if it is sold anyway, a licensing problem. Expiry caps every order in a pharmacy.

Guide · Uganda

How much to order

Most shops answer this from memory and a walk along the shelf, and it works well enough that nobody examines it. It is also the reason the same three products run out every month and the same six sit there until they expire.

The question is not "how much stock"

It is how much until the next delivery — and that is a longer stretch than most people count.

Say your supplier takes five days and you order every week. The boxes that arrive on Friday do not have to last five days. They have to last until the next lot lands: five days for the order you place next Friday, plus the seven days until you place it. Twelve days of cover, not five.

Sizing to the delivery time alone is the single most common reason a shop is out of stock every Thursday, and it looks like bad luck rather than arithmetic.

Running out teaches you to order less

This one is worth reading twice, because it is invisible and it compounds.

An empty shelf sells nothing. So a day you were out of stock looks, in your records, exactly like a day nobody wanted the product. Average those days in and demand appears lower than it is — so you order less, so you run out sooner, so more days look like no-demand days. Each cycle makes the estimate worse.

The shops this hurts most are the ones being careful with cash. They order tightly, run out, conclude the product is slow, and order more tightly still. Days you were out of stock have to be left out of the sum. They are days with no information, not days with no demand.

One school should not set your reorder level for a year

Somebody buys 240 sachets of ORS in a morning for a school. If you average your month with that day in it, you will order for a demand that happened once.

The fix is to work from a typical day rather than an average one — the middle of your days, not the mean of them. One enormous day barely moves the middle and moves an average enormously.

But it matters whether it persisted. One big day is a one-off. Three weeks of doubled sales is not — it is a clinic that started referring, or a school that opened nearby, and that is your new normal. The same number means "ignore me" or "everything has changed" depending only on whether it kept up. Nobody can tell those apart from the figures alone; you can, because you know what happened.

The thing that caps every order in a pharmacy

Ordinary stock advice says order more, less often — you save on ordering cost and usually get a better unit price. A hardware shop can do that and the worst case is cash sitting on a shelf.

A pharmacy cannot. Stock that outlives its shelf life is a guaranteed loss, and if it gets sold anyway it is a safety and licensing problem. So however good the price per tin is, the honest ceiling is what you can plausibly sell before it expires — and the cheaper-per-unit offer that pushes you past that is not a saving.

The same logic runs the other way, and it is the part people miss: boxes that will expire before you can sell them are not cover. Two hundred units expiring in three weeks, on a product you sell six of a day, is about a hundred and twenty units of stock and eighty units of loss. Counting all two hundred as stock is how a shop cancels an order it genuinely needs and then has nothing at all in a month.

Two more things people forget

What is already on the way. Ordering on Monday and again on Thursday without subtracting Monday's order is how a shop ends up with twice what it wanted and a supplier bill it did not expect.
The pack, not the unit. You may need forty and the tin holds a hundred. That is a decision — a hundred is two and a half months of stock for that line — not a rounding to do without noticing.

If you do only one thing

Pick your five fastest-moving products and, for each, work out roughly how many you sell a day and how long your supplier actually takes. Multiply the rate by the delivery time plus your ordering interval. Compare it with what you currently keep.

In most shops that one calculation, on five products, explains the majority of the stockouts.

Where software earns its place

CareBoon works the rate out from what you have actually sold, leaves out the days you were out of stock, uses a typical day rather than an average one, and shows the sentence behind every number — you sell about six a day, twelve left, five-day delivery — so you can argue with it. It subtracts what is already on order, caps the suggestion at what can be sold before it expires, and rounds to the pack the supplier actually sells. Every quantity is a box you can type over.

What it will not do: it cannot order anything — it suggests, and a person sends. It needs a few weeks of your selling before it can advise at all, and it says so rather than inventing a figure. It cannot know that a school is coming, that the rains are early, or that your supplier is about to be out for a month. And a figure worked out from stock records nobody keeps accurately is only as good as those records.

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