Pharmacy Software with Expiry and Batch Management

Item-wise stock cannot manage expiry. Batch-wise can.

If your software tells you that you hold 40 strips of a medicine, it cannot manage expiry, no matter what the feature list says. Those 40 strips arrived on different invoices, from possibly different distributors, with different batch numbers and different expiry dates. "40" is the sum; expiry lives in the parts.

Batch-wise stock means every receipt is stored as its own row: batch number, expiry, quantity, purchase rate, and which distributor it came from. That is what makes four separate things possible — an expiry report that is not a guess, a recall you can actually action, a return-to-vendor claim with the right batch on it, and FEFO.

It is also more work at the point of entry, which is why so many shops end up item-wise by default: someone typed a total instead of a batch. The fix is not discipline, it is making batch entry the path of least resistance — read from the purchase invoice rather than typed by hand.

FEFO, and why it is not FIFO

FEFO — First Expiry, First Out — means the batch that expires soonest is the one dispensed next, regardless of when it arrived. FIFO (First In, First Out) sells the oldest arrival first, and in pharmacy those are routinely not the same batch: a delivery that arrives today can easily carry a shorter dating than one that arrived two months ago.

Every strip sold from the wrong batch is a strip that leaves the short-dated one on the shelf to expire. Over a year, across a few thousand SKUs, that difference compounds into the expiry-loss line.

What to check in any package: when a medicine is billed, is the batch chosen for you by expiry, or does the person at the counter pick from a list? A dropdown is not FEFO. A dropdown is FIFO with extra steps, because under pressure people pick the first row.

"EXP 08/2026" means the 31st — and getting this wrong costs a month

A pack prints a month, not a day. Storage needs a full date, so something has to choose the day — and that choice is worth real money.

A medicine printed EXP 08/2026 is legally sellable through 31 August 2026. Software that stores it as 1 August throws away up to thirty days of sellable stock on every pack it touches. We know the size of that error because we made a version of it ourselves: four different places in this codebase once resolved the same month to four different days, and the fix was to give the whole system one resolver that always answers the last day of the month.

Two related traps worth checking in any package you evaluate:

• Can it refuse an unparseable date? A system that guesses is worse than one that asks. Ours refuses and asks, because the alternative is a batch with an invented expiry sitting in live stock.
• What does the "no expiry" option write? If the answer is a far-future date like 9999-12-31, that batch can never be blocked as expired — a dead end that gets used precisely when someone is stuck, which is the worst possible moment. Ours works that way today: a batch saved with “No expiry” is never blocked, so keep that option for items that genuinely carry no expiry.

If you keep expiry dates in a spreadsheet today, our free expiry date decoder converts the printed formats to a real last-sellable date, and the stock register format has the batch and expiry columns already laid out.

The return window is the number that decides your loss

The expiry date is not your deadline. Your deadline is whatever your distributor's return policy says — commonly a window of some months before expiry, after which the pack is your loss rather than theirs. Terms vary by distributor and by company, so the only reliable version is the one written on your own purchase terms.

This is why a 30/60/90-day expiry view matters more than a single alert. Different windows need different actions:

• 90 days out — still returnable almost everywhere. This is where money is saved: raise the return claim, or move the stock while it is worth moving.
• 60 days out — returnable under most terms, but the paperwork has to be moving now.
• 30 days out — usually past the window. Now it is a pricing and placement decision, not a return.
• Expired — off the shelf, out of the sellable pool, and into the disposal record.

The useful report is therefore not "what is expiring" but "what is expiring and still returnable, worth this much money, from this distributor". That is a report you can act on in one pass.

How Nesayo handles it

• Batch-wise by default. Every receipt carries its own batch, expiry, quantity and distributor. Stock imported from a CSV, an Excel export or a photographed purchase invoice is read into batches, not into a single total.
• FEFO at the counter. The soonest-expiring sellable batch is chosen automatically when a medicine goes on a bill. Nobody picks from a dropdown under pressure.
• Expired batches are refused. Not warned about, not dismissible — Nesayo refuses to bill a batch once its expiry month has passed, on any surface: the till, chat, or voice. This is a regulatory requirement, so it is not a setting. (A batch saved with “No expiry” has no date to check, so it is never blocked.)
• A month means its last day. One resolver decides it for the whole system, and an unparseable date is refused rather than guessed.
• Checked every six hours. The Expiry Guard agent re-reads every batch on a schedule and surfaces what has entered a window, rather than waiting to be asked.
• Freshly imported dates are treated as unverified until a pharmacist confirms them, because a date read from a photograph is evidence, not proof.

Batch tracking, FEFO and expiry blocking are part of the free billing tier — they are compliance, not an upsell. The AI Employee plan (₹999/month as of September 2026) adds the agents that go looking for problems on their own; Starter (₹399/month) adds voice billing, prescription scanning and Refill Radar.

Four questions that separate real expiry management from a feature bullet

1. Is stock stored per batch, or per item? Ask to see two batches of the same medicine with different expiry dates, side by side. If the software cannot show that, everything below is moot.
2. Who picks the batch at billing — the software, or the person? Automatic selection by expiry is FEFO. A dropdown is not.
3. What happens if you try to bill an expired batch? The honest answer is "it refuses". A warning that can be clicked through will be clicked through on a busy evening.
4. Does the expiry report know about the return window? A list of what expires next month is information. A list of what is still returnable is money.