How to Manage Hospital Supplies in your Veterinary Practice

Are you guys ready for some really cool news?! My business turns a year old this month! So I wanted to thank you for joining me on my journey, for reading my posts, and supporting me! It gives me SO MUCH joy to chat with new people, hear your stories, try to be there and support you & your hospitals, and of course, meet some amazing veterinary professionals! So thank you, thank you, thank you!!

I am adding a cool (I think anyway!) blog feature… video demonstrations! Please let me know if there is anything you would like to see!

For the very first video, I wanted to touch on something that I get asked probably the most frequently. How in the world do I manage hospital supplies? That is a fairly loaded question! I think each hospital has their own unique way of doing it. I have seen some pretty ingenious ways of trying to manage the beast! Some of them include:

• Having a clipboard on the wall of the hospital supplies (for example: needles, syringes, gauze, gloves, etc) and every time thing gets opened, a tally gets added (or written on the list)
• Every time a box gets opened, the lid is torn off and thrown in a box
• Take them out of inventory as soon as they come in

But the one thing I see that I want to talk about, is having a “hospital” account (you know, the one that is a client named ABC Animal Hospital, with a client named “Supplies”), and each time something is used, it is put on the hospital account, and the dollar amount is set to zero. This might sound like a good idea in theory, but every time an item is discounted, it messes up your sales reports, income reports, and other numbers that are important to monitor on a regular basis. So, although it may seem like an okay idea, I generally advise against it, because I feel like it makes some numbers inaccurate.

Let’s look at an example, let’s so you drop a bottle of Antisedan (whoops!!), and it shatters and breaks (double whoops! I think I am just cringing just writing this), so you add to the hospital account and zero out the cost. Now, when you go to review your usage reports, it will be inaccurate. We can even go a step further, let’s say you were interested in performing an ABC analysis. Now, it will show an inaccurate relationship between the cost and sales of an item.

So, what can we do instead? Remove it from your practice management software using a variance. I like this because a) you can assign a reason why it was removed, b) you can add notes to what happened, and c) it doesn’t inaccurately impact your sales reports.

In the video below, I will walk through how to perform a variance in AviMark. As always, if you have any questions, please don’t hesitate to let me know!