Start from the dispensing system, not the bank feed
The number your pharmacy earned today lives in Kroll, not in the bank account. Ontario Drug Benefit claims adjudicate in real time through the Health Network System, but the ministry pays on its own remittance cycle, net of reversals and post-payment adjustments. Private adjudicators such as Telus Health and Express Scripts Canada settle on their own schedules too. Our End-to-End Accounting service reconciles every payer stream from adjudicated claim to bank deposit, so the revenue on your statements is what the dispensary actually did.
| Revenue stream | What has to be reconciled |
|---|---|
| Till sales (cash, debit, credit) | POS totals to processor batches and deposits, with HST isolated on the taxable front store |
| ODB remittances | Adjudicated claims to ministry payments, net of reversals, patient co-payments and clawbacks |
| Private plans (Telus Health, Express Scripts Canada) | Claim-level settlements by adjudicator, plus rejected claims that quietly become receivables |
| Clinical programs (MedsCheck, flu shots, minor-ailment assessments) | Per-service fees billed to the province and actually collected |
Every clawback and short payment has to land somewhere. Untracked, it lands in margin and you stop trusting your own reports. Tracked, it becomes a receivable with a name on it and a follow-up date.
Timing matters for cash as much as for accuracy. A busy week of dispensing is a receivable, not a deposit, and the gap between adjudication and payment is exactly when the wholesaler invoice comes due. Clean payer reconciliation tells you what is truly available to spend, not just what was rung through.
Clinical programs deserve their own line in the ledger too. MedsCheck reviews, flu-shot season and minor-ailment assessments are a growing slice of pharmacy revenue, billed per service to the province, and they behave nothing like dispensing. We track them separately so you can see whether the hours they consume actually pay.
Drug inventory and shrink, counted like the asset it is
Dispensary stock is one of the largest figures on a pharmacy balance sheet and one of the fastest moving, so small errors compound quickly. We run perpetual inventory that agrees with reality: scheduled cycle counts by section, expiry write-offs posted when stock actually goes to the reverse distributor, and narcotic reconciliations that answer both Health Canada record-keeping and your own shrink question.
Shrink in a pharmacy is rarely one problem. It is several small ones:
- Expiries and short-dated stock written off late, or never
- Wholesaler returns sent back but never matched to a credit note
- Generic price amendments that move cost of goods while the shelf stays the same
- Front-store theft, the ordinary retail kind
- Clawbacks recorded as sales that were never actually paid
Statements from McKesson Canada or Kohl & Frisch arrive dense with credits, returns and price changes. We tie purchases to statements line by line, so gross margin by department is a fact rather than a feeling.
Payroll for a bench you cannot leave short
A pharmacy roster mixes staff pharmacists, registered pharmacy technicians and assistants across seven-day retail hours, which means overtime, statutory-holiday pay and split shifts handled correctly. Payroll runs inside the same engagement as the books: source deductions remitted on time, T4s that tie to the ledger, ROEs and vacation accruals without a scramble, and Ontario Employer Health Tax tracked properly once payroll passes the $1,000,000 exemption available to eligible private employers.
Relief pharmacists deserve particular care. Some invoice through their own corporations, some are effectively casual employees, and the CRA cares about the difference. We review how each arrangement actually works before it hardens into a pattern, so a routine payroll exam does not end in a reclassification bill.
Month-end that separates the dispensary from the front store
One blended margin number hides everything useful. Your monthly package splits dispensary revenue from front-store retail, shows scripts dispensed, margin by department and payroll as a share of gross profit, and keeps HST filings, instalments and remittance deadlines on a single calendar. That is what a Mississauga or GTA owner needs in hand before deciding on longer hours, a second pharmacist or a banner change.
The stack is deliberately simple: Kroll and the front-store POS feed QuickBooks Online, receipts flow through Dext, and payables run on approvals rather than memory. When a decision outgrows month-end, whether that is financing a purchase, modelling a renovation or preparing for a lender review, the same books feed straight into our Fractional CFO work.
Source: CRA — Payroll.
