Monday morning, three branches, three spreadsheets
You own three or four pharmacies. On Monday you want to know how last week went: items dispensed, services delivered, retail takings, locum costs, anything that went wrong. So you message each branch manager. One sends a spreadsheet, one sends a photo of the till report, one forgets until Wednesday.
You paste it all into your own spreadsheet. The numbers do not quite compare, because each branch counts slightly differently. By the time the picture is complete, the week is half over.
The questions you actually want answered are pharmacy questions. Is the item count at the high street branch holding up since the surgery merger? How many Pharmacy First consultations did each branch do, and were they claimed? Which branch is leaning hardest on locums, and is that a vacancy or a rota built badly? How many owings are open at each site? None of that is in one place.
Why the figures never line up
Each branch has the same kinds of systems but not always the same ones. Even with the same PMR, reports are run differently, on different days, with different filters. Services are recorded on a separate platform. Retail is on the till. Staffing is in a rota spreadsheet. Nobody has joined them together.
Branch managers are busy and reporting is a job for the end of the day, which is exactly when the dispensary is still finishing. So the report is late, rushed and inconsistent.
There is also a timing problem specific to pharmacy. Item figures from the PMR are available daily, but the payment for those items arrives months later, and service claims sit in a separate portal on their own cycle. Without a single view, you are always comparing this week's items with last quarter's money.
The cost of reporting by message
| Symptom | Effect on the business |
|---|---|
| Late figures | Problems at one branch are spotted weeks after they start |
| Inconsistent counts | Branches cannot be compared fairly |
| Manager time | Reporting takes time from running the branch |
| Owner time | You rebuild the same spreadsheet every week |
| No history | Trends by branch are hard to see |
A group dashboard fed from the branches
- Source mapping for each branch: which PMR, which clinical services platform, which till, which accounts package such as Xero or Sage, which rota. We check what each can export or share.
- Automatic collection of the agreed figures each night or each week, through APIs, scheduled exports, or a report emailed to a collection address.
- Consistent definitions, agreed with you once: what counts as an item, a service, a sale, a locum day. Every branch is measured the same way.
- An owner dashboard with each branch side by side and the group total, week on week and against the same week last year.
- Pharmacy measures alongside the sales ones: items and forms per day, services by type, open owings, compliance pack patients, delivery drops and responsible pharmacist hours covered by locums.
- Exception flags when a branch figure moves outside a range you set, such as items dropping sharply or locum costs rising.
- A branch view for each manager showing their own figures, so they see what you see.
Where a system gives us nothing, we keep a short manual form for that figure rather than leaving a hole in the dashboard.
Mondays with the numbers already there
The dashboard updates without anyone being asked. On Monday morning you see how each branch did and which one needs a phone call. Managers stop spending Friday evenings on spreadsheets. When you want to know how a service has grown across the group, you look rather than ask.
Conversations with managers change too. Instead of asking for figures, you ask about them: why items dipped on Thursday, why one branch has twice the open owings of another, whether the locum spend at the newest branch is a staffing gap or a rota habit.
Is your group reporting like this?
- You collect branch figures by message or email each week
- Branches report the same figure in different ways
- It takes until mid-week to see last week's picture
- You maintain your own master spreadsheet by hand
- You struggle to compare branches over a year