Chiropractic Office Profitability: The Top Two Features for Your POS System

The main benefit of sales at the point of service, commonly called “point of sale” (POS), is the improvement of the relationship with the patient. By offering your patients quality products that enrich their lives outside of your office, you demonstrate your care. Your patients remember you, and your concern for them, every time they use the products you sell them. Better patient loyalty means fewer churn, frequent referrals, and eventually better profits.

On the other hand, as soon as outlets account for a significant portion of your revenue, you need to prepare to control your inventory. Have you recently talked to an upset patient who couldn’t pick up an item at her clinic because she ran out of it? Do you rely on his or your office manager’s own memory to keep your inventory up to date? Or maybe you manually check your inventory every month? If your POS is a major source of additional revenue, you need to control the flow of items in and out of your practice inventory.

To increase the profitability of your practice, you need to have the right supplies on hand and eliminate unselling products:

• Track the average income of a specific product
• View total product sales by name or SKU

The most important aspect of its implementation is that you don’t need to remember to periodically look at any inventory reports. Instead, integrated inventory control should be part of your standard workflow control. For example, you need automatic alerts on reaching predetermined inventory levels. A list of features goes on:

• Adjust your inventory automatically with invoice creation
• Create patient bills directly from your scheduler or POS screen
• Set automatic reminders to reorder stock when needed
• Use touch screen monitors to pick inventory
• Track the average income of 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 periods of time

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 minimum levels. Competent inventory management also seeks to control the costs associated with inventory. Inventory management for a medical practice is a balancing act between two key aspects: time and reserve stock.

Time tracking 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 you to sell those items.

Reserve stock means additional units above and beyond the minimum number required to maintain a smooth point-of-sale process. A buffer helps to minimize the possibility of production interruption and patient complaints due to lack of inventory.

At a minimum, you should automate two key inventory control functions:

1. inventory tracking. Track POS inventory by aggregating the number of items on hand for each POS item. This number will automatically update each time you sell a POS item.
2. Low stock alerts. Automatic system-generated workflow tickets remind key members of your staff when stocks run low – that is, whenever you reach a minimum inventory threshold for a given point-of-sale item.