Selling retail products and skincare

Retail sales let you sell skincare and other products over the counter, take the payment however the patient pays, and have the sale drop straight into your stock levels and your finance figures. It is a simple till: no card is charged here, you just record the money you have taken.

Enabling a product for retail

Go to Stock and add or open a product. Tick Retail item and set a retail price (and, if you like, the cost so you can see your margin). Only products marked as retail, and not archived, appear in the sale form, so your injectable consumables never show up as something to sell. You can also set a product's VAT category (medical or cosmetic); this is used to prefill the VAT on a sale.

Recording a sale

On the Stock page, use Record sale:

1. Add one or more lines. Pick the product and the price fills in from its retail price; you can change the price and the quantity on the line.
2. Optionally link a patient, or leave it as a walk-in.
3. Choose how the patient paid: card terminal, cash, bank transfer or other. This is a record only, so take the payment on your own terminal or till as usual.
4. Set the VAT category for the sale. It prefills from the products when they agree, otherwise it defaults to cosmetic; change it if you need to.
5. Press Record sale.

Fulfilment: taken away, to collect, or to post

Every sale records how the goods leave the clinic. Taken away is the default for a normal counter sale and needs nothing extra. Choose To collect if the patient will pick the items up later, or To post if you are sending them out.

When a sale is to post, capture the delivery address (it prefills from the patient's record when one is linked and has an address) and, if you charge for postage, add the optional postage amount. Postage is part of the sale total and follows the same VAT category as the goods, so there is nothing separate to account for. A postage line does not touch your stock.

Awaiting dispatch

Sales that are to collect or to post appear in the Awaiting dispatch list on the Stock page until you deal with them. When you have handed the items over or put them in the post, press Mark collected or Mark posted and the sale drops off the list.

Stock and VAT

Recording a sale automatically deducts the quantity sold from each product's stock level, shown as a sold movement in the stock history, so your levels stay right without a separate adjustment. The payment lands in Finance like any other takings: it is included in your day and month totals, appears in the ledger as a retail payment, and is counted in the VAT report under the VAT category you chose for the sale (medical or cosmetic).

Reversing a mistaken sale

If you record a sale in error, two things need putting right: the stock and the money.

• Stock. Add the items back with a stock adjustment on the Stock page (a positive quantity for each product), so your levels are correct again.
• Money. If you have already refunded the patient, record a refund on the Finance page so your takings reflect the money going back out.

If the sale needs unwinding cleanly rather than by hand, contact support and we can reverse it for you: we undo the stock and mark the original payment as failed so it no longer counts, while keeping a record of what happened.

Also want to sell online?

Recording sales at the counter is only half the picture. If you would like patients to buy your retail products online and have them posted out, you can switch on a skincare shop right on your booking page. Online orders come back to the same place as your counter sales, in Awaiting dispatch on the Stock page, and count towards the same retail and VAT reporting. See Selling skincare online: your shop page to set it up.