What to ask before you buy pharmacy software in Kenya

Search for pharmacy software in Kenya and you will mostly find ranked lists. They are cheap to write, they rarely say who wrote them, and the ranking usually reflects who paid or who wrote the article rather than which system suits a pharmacy in Kitengela with one till and a cashier who changes every eight months.

A better approach is to stop looking for the best system and start looking for the questions that expose a bad fit. These are the twelve we would ask if we were buying, including the ones whose honest answer costs us the sale.

This is the first question, not a technical footnote. Ask the vendor to unplug the router during the demonstration and then sell you something.

There are three honest answers, and they are very different:

• Nothing works. The system is a website. When the connection drops, the counter stops. Common, and often not disclosed until it happens on a Saturday.
• A limited offline mode. You can keep selling into a cache and it synchronises later. Ask what happens when two tills cache the same stock, and what happens if the cache is lost before it syncs.
• It runs on your computer. The application and the records are on the machine in front of you, so a connection is irrelevant to selling.

None of these is automatically right. A cloud system gives you access from home and somebody else runs the backups. The point is to know which one you are buying.

On your computer, in a data centre in Kenya, or in a data centre somewhere else? This matters for speed, for what happens when you stop paying, and for who can read your pharmacy’s trading history. Ask to be shown the answer rather than told it.

The question behind the question is what happens if you leave, or if the vendor closes. A pharmacy that cannot export its own stock list, sales history and supplier records is not a customer, it is a hostage.

Ask for an export during the trial, not a promise of one. Open the file. If it arrives as a PDF report rather than a spreadsheet, that is an answer.

Monthly pricing is easy to approve and hard to compare. Multiply by sixty, add the second till, and add whatever is charged for support or for a version upgrade. Then do the same for a one-time licence.

Neither model is a trick. A subscription buys ongoing hosting and a team on the other end of it. A one-time licence is cheaper over a long horizon and puts the upgrade risk on you. Just do the arithmetic before signing rather than after. Our own pricing page shows the five-year comparison against whatever figure you have been quoted.

A price per user punishes you for hiring. A price per computer is predictable. A price per branch matters the day you open the second one. Ask what happens to the price when a locum works a weekend.

Some systems need a specific receipt printer, a particular scanner, or a machine newer than the one on your counter. Get the minimum specification in writing, and check whether the quoted price includes the hardware or assumes it.

Nearly every vendor will say M-Pesa is supported. The useful question is what that means at the counter:

• Can one sale be split between cash and M-Pesa?
• Is the payment recorded against the sale, or typed into a note?
• Does the shift reconcile cash and M-Pesa separately at closing?

A system where M-Pesa is a payment type reconciles at the end of the day. A system where it is a comment field does not.

Medicine is not groceries. The same product arrives in batches with different expiry dates and often different costs, and the batch that should leave the shelf first is the one expiring soonest. A system that tracks a single quantity per product cannot tell you what is about to expire.

Ask whether stock is tracked per batch, whether dispensing suggests the shortest-dated batch automatically, and whether there is a report of what expires in the next ninety days. We wrote about why this is where the money leaks in the guide on expiry and FEFO.

Be specific, and be suspicious of a yes. Ask separately about KRA eTIMS invoicing, about SHA claims if you intend to serve SHA members, and about the records the Pharmacy and Poisons Board expects you to keep.

A vendor who answers yes to all three without qualification is worth a second question. So is one who answers no: no system covers everything, and what matters is knowing the gaps before you meet them. Ours are set out in the eTIMS guide.

A person, a ticket queue, or a WhatsApp number that is somebody’s personal phone? None is wrong, but they behave very differently at five on a Saturday with a queue at the counter. Ask what hours are covered and what a realistic response time looks like.

Small software companies close. If the system runs on your own computer and you can export your data, closure is an inconvenience. If it is hosted and you cannot, it is an emergency. This is really question two and question three asked together, and it is worth asking on its own anyway.

Not a scripted demonstration on the vendor’s sample data. A trial, on your counter, with your stock, your prices and your staff, for long enough to include a delivery, a stock count and a full week of closing the till.

Most disappointment after a purchase is something a real week would have surfaced. If a vendor will not allow one, ask yourself what the demonstration was hiding.

We build Optima, so read this section knowing that. Rather than claim it wins every question above, here is where it lands honestly.

It answers question one well. Optima installs on your Windows computer and keeps its records there, so selling, receiving stock, counting stock, closing a shift and printing a report all work with the router unplugged. Extra tills talk to the main computer over your own local network, not over the internet.

Batches and expiry are the core of it, not an add-on, and dispensing follows first-expiry-first-out automatically.

It is bought once, per computer, VAT included, with lifetime updates.

What it does not do today: it does not submit invoices to KRA eTIMS yet, it does not submit SHA claims, and branches run separate copies rather than sharing one database and combined reports. If any of those three is the reason you are buying software this month, Optima is not yet the right answer, and we would rather tell you now than after you have paid.