A stock adjustment can make a report look tidy without fixing the problem. If staff enter 86 units because that is what they counted, the system now agrees with the shelf—but the missing 14 units may disappear again next week.
A useful pharmacy stock audit ends with an explained difference, a supporting record and a changed routine. This checklist is designed for a small team that cannot close the shop for a full-day count.
Start with one shelf, not the entire shop
Choose a manageable section and a quiet period. Include a few high-value lines, a few fast-moving lines and products with repeated discrepancies. These are business priorities, not a substitute for separate procedures required for controlled medicines.
Assign one person to count and another to review. Give the counter a blank quantity column rather than the expected balance. Confirm which locations are included: counter drawers, back-room stock, reserved orders and segregated stock can otherwise be missed or counted twice.
Decide how movements will be handled while counting. Either pause movement in that section or maintain a time-stamped transaction log. A sale made between the physical count and the report export can create an apparent shortage even when nothing is missing.
Normalize packs, strips and individual units
Write the counting unit before counting anything. For a hypothetical product with ten tablets per strip, eight sealed strips plus six loose tablets represent 86 tablets. They do not represent 14 strips, 86 strips or eight saleable packs.
Use this worksheet:
| Product and strength | Batch | Location | Base unit | Sealed units | Loose units | Count time | Reviewer |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Example product | B-104 | Shelf A2 | Tablet | 80 | 6 | 09:20 | Initials |
Expiry and stock status belong alongside the batch record. Do not combine saleable, damaged and segregated quantities into one available-stock number. WHO's storage and distribution guidance is relevant background for handling and traceability; local requirements still apply.
Investigate before changing the balance
Suppose the system expects 100 tablets and the shelf holds 86. The variance is −14 tablets. At a hypothetical cost of 8 currency units each, the value at cost is −112. Valuing the difference at selling price would answer a different question.
Check the last verified balance, then receiving, sales, returns, transfers and adjustments. Ask whether a pack conversion was wrong, a delivery was entered twice, a refund omitted a stock action or a damaged item was removed without documentation. Recount independently before concluding that a shortage is real. An unexplained variance alone is not evidence of theft.
Keep an exception log with the original quantity, physical quantity, reason, evidence, approver and corrective action. Corrections should remain traceable rather than overwriting history without an explanation.
Build a weekly routine
Count a small, repeatable set each week. Track both accuracy and recurrence: ten corrected differences are less encouraging if the same receipt-entry problem caused all ten. Recheck previously corrected lines after the process change.
A practical first-week target is one completed count with every discrepancy assigned an owner and follow-up date. Choose your own acceptable variance policy based on risk and value; there is no universal percentage that makes a pharmacy safe.
For software teams, the key design decision is to separate observed counts from posted adjustments. A count record should not automatically become permission to modify the ledger. Store the count timestamp, base unit and movement cut-off so another person can reconstruct the comparison.
Put it to work
Export your stock list, choose one section and run a blind count tomorrow. Use RunMyPharmacy's inventory-management workflow as a starting point for reviewing product and batch records, and explore its shelf-management tools. The worksheet above is a manual operating procedure, not a claim that automated cycle counting is built into the product.
Disclosure: written for the RunMyPharmacy team with AI drafting assistance and an editorial check of examples, links and product claims. We build the linked product. Examples are hypothetical; worksheets and illustrative software-design advice are not guarantees of product automation.
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