Chiropractic Office Profitability: The Top Two Features for Your Point of Sale System
The main benefit of sales at the point of service, commonly called “point of sale” (POS), is a better relationship with the patient. By offering your patients quality products that enrich their lives outside of your office, you show your care. Your patients remember you, and your concern for them, every time they use the products you sell to them. Greater patient loyalty means less attrition, frequent referrals, and eventually better earnings.
On the other hand, as soon as the points of sale represent a significant part of your income, you need to prepare to control your inventory. Have you recently talked to an upset patient who couldn’t pick up an item at your clinic because they ran out of stock? Are you relying on your own memory or that of your office manager to keep your inventory up to date? Or maybe you manually check your inventory every month? If your point of sale is a significant source of additional revenue, you need to control the flow of items to and from your practice’s inventory.
To increase the profitability of your practice, you must have the right supplies on hand and eliminate unsold products:
- Track average income for a specific product
- View total product sales by name or SKU
The most important aspect of your implementation is that you do not need to remember to periodically check your inventory reports. Instead, built-in inventory control should be part of your standard workflow control. For example, you need automatic alerts on how to reach predetermined inventory levels. A list of features continues:
- Adjust your inventory automatically with invoice creation
- Create patient invoices directly from your programmer or POS screen
- Set up automatic reminders to reorder stock when needed
- Use touch screen monitors to select inventory
- Track average income for a specific product
- View total product sales by name or SKU
- Scan barcodes easily with a scanner
- Enable discount campaigns on selected products for predefined time periods
Inventory management
Disciplined inventory management requires keeping accurate records of POS items, which means posting newly arrived items and subtracting items you sold to patients. Typically, your goal is to prevent inventory from growing too large or falling below defined minimums. Competent inventory management also seeks to control costs associated with inventory. Inventory management for a medical practice is a balancing act between two key aspects: time and reserve stock.
Time control helps you decide when to replenish your inventory and by how many units. It requires understanding how long it takes for a supplier to process an order and deliver a product to your clinic. You also need to know how long it will take to sell those items.
Reserve stock means additional units above and beyond the minimum number required to maintain a smooth process at the point of sale. A buffer helps minimize the possibility of production disruption and patient complaints due to a lack of inventory.
At a minimum, you should automate two key inventory control functions:
- Inventory tracking. Track POS inventory by adding the quantity of items available for each POS item. This number will be automatically updated every time you sell a point of sale item.
- Low stock alerts. Workflow tickets automatically generated by the system remind key members of your staff when stocks are depleted – that is, whenever you reach a minimum inventory threshold for a given POS item.