From an empty workspace to your first sale
The shape of the work is always the same. Create a workspace, tell it about your business, describe the rooms you keep stock in, enter the medicines you sell, then bring in the stock and trade. An hour of setup, and you can sell from the till the same day.
Each step below opens. The keys in grey are the actual keys on the screen it describes.
Go to Create a workspace and give your business name, your own name, an email address and a password. Your workspace gets an address of its own and your account is the administrator of it.
- Nothing is installed. You sign in with a browser on the till.
- The workspace comes with sample data so you can look around before your own list goes in.
- Sign in with the username and password you chose. Your branch and counter come from the machine you are sitting at, so there is nothing else to pick.
If you are ever locked out because your account is signed in somewhere else, sign in again here: the earlier session is closed and you are told so.
Open Settings from the Gateway. Fill in the details that appear on every document you hand a customer, before you print anything for real.
- Pharmacy name, address, telephone and TIN.
- Currency and the wording on the bottom of the receipt.
- The accounting period you are trading in, so takings land in the right one.
Press Esc to go back to the Gateway, F1 for the manual on any screen.
Open Stores. Your first branch is already there. What you add now are the rooms that actually exist, because stock is counted per room and not per shop.
- A central warehouse, where deliveries land.
- A pharmacy dispensing counter, which is what the till sells from.
- A triage store if the nurses keep their own consumables, and a laboratory store for reagents.
- F4 to add a store, F6 to edit one, F9 to export the list.
Name them after the real rooms, not after the system. A cashier signing in at the till machine sells from the counter that machine belongs to, so the names are read out loud every day.
If you have a second shop, add it as another branch. Its stock, sales, patients and orders stay its own, and staff assigned there see only that branch.
Work from the top down: categories, brands and dosage forms first, then the medicines that use them. Each of those is a register with the same keys.
- Categories such as Antibiotics or Analgesics, then brands, then dosage forms such as tablet, capsule, syrup or injection.
- Then Medicines: name, category, brand, dosage form, unit, selling price and the level at which you want to be warned to reorder.
- F4 add, F6 edit, F8 delete, F9 export to a spreadsheet.
Do not enter quantities here. A medicine record is the description of a product. The quantity arrives with a batch, in the next step, which is what keeps expiry dates honest.
Enter the fifty things you sell most first. The rest can be added as you meet them.
Stock comes in through Procurement, the same way it comes through your door. Add the supplier, raise a purchase order, then record what arrived against it.
- Suppliers: F4 to add who you buy from.
- Purchase order: one line per product, with the quantity you ordered. Print it for the supplier if you send orders on paper.
- Goods received note: receive against that order and enter, for every line, the quantity, the batch number, the expiry date and what you paid.
- Choose the store room it is going into, normally the central warehouse.
The stock you already have on your shelves today comes in the same way. Make one goods received note for your opening stock, batch by batch, with the real expiry dates off the boxes. That one evening of typing is what makes first to expire dispensing correct from your very first sale.
Stock in the warehouse cannot be sold. The till sells what is on its own counter, so the last move before trading is to put medicines on the shelf.
- In Stores, press F4 to raise a requisition from the dispensing counter to the warehouse, listing what you want and how much.
- The store manager issues it, and the quantity moves from one room to the other. The batch goes with it, so the expiry date travels too.
- The till can raise a requisition itself, without leaving the till, when it sees that a medicine is out on the counter but present in the warehouse.
This is the step most shops skip on the first day and then wonder why the till says there is none. If the point of sale shows a product with nothing on the counter, it is in another room, and the screen tells you how much.
Open the point of sale from the Gateway. You are already at a branch and a counter, so there is nothing to choose before you start.
- Touch a product in the grid, or type a few letters of the name, and set the quantity.
- The sale takes from the batch that expires first, and splits the line across batches if one batch is not enough.
- If you are dispensing a prescription, quote its reference on the sale.
- Take payment by cash, card, mobile money, bank transfer or credit, and print the 80mm receipt.
- Esc back to the Gateway, Ctrl + B to change station, F1 for help.
Sell one real item, then look at Stock. The counter has gone down, the batch has gone down, and the sale is in the day's takings. If those three agree, your setup is right.
Two more steps for the consulting room
Do these after the counter is trading. The clinic bills through the same till, so it needs the pharmacy working first.
A clinic charge is a service with a price, in the same way a medicine is a product with a price.
- Services: consultation, review, dressing, injection, and anything else you charge for. F4 to add each one with its price.
- Laboratory: the tests you offer, with their prices, so an order can be billed the moment the doctor asks for it.
- Check the staff who will use these have the right role: Doctor, Nurse, Laboratory Technician or Receptionist, each with its own screens.
Take one patient all the way through before you open the doors, so everyone has seen their own part of it.
- Reception registers the patient with F4 and starts a visit. The patient joins the live queue.
- The nurse takes vitals at triage: temperature, blood pressure, pulse, weight and height. The BMI is worked out for you.
- The doctor takes the next patient from the queue, writes the consultation, writes a prescription, and orders any tests.
- The laboratory records results against the order and prints the report.
- The cashier calls the visit to the till and settles it once: consultation, tests and medicines on one receipt.
The prescription the doctor wrote is the one the pharmacy dispenses, so nothing is copied out by hand between the two rooms.
The keyboard, in one screen
The application is meant to be worked with hands on the keys. These are the same everywhere, and F1 shows the full list on any screen.
Moving around
On any register or list
Ready to set yours up
Create a workspace and work down this page. If you get stuck on a step, F1 on that screen explains it in the application itself.
Create a workspace See what it does