When I worked in my brother's Pharmacy shop 4 years ago, I discovered everything was manual. Sales were recorded manually and receipts too were issued manually. I began to wonder how a big and we'll furnished pharmacy would be in the practice of writing sold items down and issuing handwritten receipts. That was not my main worry. My main worry was what they did with the data after collecting them. How did they calculate their monthly profit or know which items are always in hot demand , expiring or out of stock. How do they know when an item is missing? How do they know how the sales trend was like in previous days, weeks or months?
I discovered that some drugs would expire weeks before their knowledge probably because they have forgotten they exist because of low patronage of the particular products. If they had prior knowledge about the expiration, probably they'd have auctioned them to other pharmacy. Again knowing when and how much order to place is very important. You don't stock all your shelves with lowly demanded items when part of the money could have been used to order for hotselling items. You should also know which items generates most of the profits for you. The ones in high demand might not necessarily contribute much to the overall profit and those ones with few demands might be the one generating the bulk of the profit. Knowing these arms you for a better business decisions. Business is not gambling. These are business decisions you will not be able to make unless you're armed with the information.

Now how do you digitize your pharmacy to be able to harvest these information?

The best time to digitize your shop is before its launch. This is because you can easily take record of the new stock and categorize them Before they are shelved . But if you have already launched it, might be hectic counting all the items. Either way, the first step is to take record of the number of each of the items in stock, their expiry dates, cost price, selling price, categories. Next is to number or label your shelves. and stock them according to the categories they belong. For example, shelf A contains pain killers. then A1, A2, A3 contains different pain killers and so on. Categorizing is good because it helps you locate items faster. It's also tasking to categorize every item but it is worth the stress. If you can't categorize them, at least make sure the locations of each items are noted. So in essence, we're noting down the drug/item names, categories (pain killers, blood medicine, stomach, skin, etc) expiry dates, number in stock, cost price, selling price.

With this data at your disposal, it's time to digitize.
What you need:

1.A good computer: desktop or laptop. If you must go for a desktop, you will need a good UPS.
2. A receipt printer
3.A POS/cash register software
4. Good power source.
5. You can hire a fast data entry expert that will not misspell your items.

Features a good POS software must have :