Delegating Office Work to Your Pharmacy Team
An independent pharmacy owner needs to focus on the business by exploring new business opportunities and caring for patients, but too often the pharmacist is spending time with payroll and bills. Delegating certain tasks to a tech or other staff member can help alleviate stress and provide the owner with more time to grow the store.
In this video, Bonnie Bond, CPA, and Katie Musorofiti, CPA, of Sykes & Company, P.A. discuss which back-office tasks your independent pharmacy business can delegate while still giving the owner oversight on important decisions. By training your team, you also advance their skills and empower them to help your pharmacy grow.
Are you a pharmacist who feels like you are approaching burnout? See our first delegation series video on why pharmacist owner burnout is a risk factor in pharmacy failures…and what you can do to avoid it.
If you prefer to read this content, the video transcript is below.
Why should a pharmacist learn to delegate?
Bonnie: Well, it’s really important for a pharmacist and an owner of an independent store to really be spending their time out growing the business, meeting with providers and doing everything they can to grow the store. So any time spent doing anything other than that, and filling the scripts obviously, really needs to be delegated to someone else so they can really focus that time on growing the top line revenue.
Katie: And by delegating tasks to some trusted employees, it really helps with employee retention, it gives them a feeling of being invested in the success of the pharmacy, and creating a really powerful team on their side.
Bonnie: You know and when you don’t learn to delegate, some things can happen as well with your financials. If the information isn’t given to a CPA on a timely basis, those monthly financial statements are going to get behind, they’re not going to be accurate. It’s all kind of part of just keeping all these processes going, and everything happening on a real time basis to make sure that things are accurate the way they need to be.
Which tasks can a pharmacist typically delegate?
Bonnie: So at Sykes & Company, what we like to see on a daily basis from each store is a report from the point of sale system, and also a report from the script system. That gives us the information we need to put into the accounting file to record sales tax and the daily sales information and to look at trends as far as script counts and things like that. Those are very basic reports that could take about five minutes a day that could easily be done by a staff member. That just makes up part of their day is to pull those reports and scan those over to us, and five minutes sounds like a short amount of time but that’s five minutes every day that that pharmacist didn’t have to touch that information.
Katie: And in other areas, a pharmacist owner may want to have final oversight in automated bill payment and payroll. But those are areas where the clerk or staff member can be uploading bills to Bill.com where the owner has final approval and pay that they can do on their phone at night and approve a bill five minutes a night versus loading, writing out checks, doing that themselves. Another thing is payroll. Obviously they’re going to want to be in tune with that. Payroll is a big expense for a pharmacy. So they’re going to want that final oversight, but it’s another staff member that could be in charge of working directly with the payroll service to report hours and the reporting of it. They can delegate some of the daily tasks associated with it.
Bonnie: I think the important thing to remember is even when you delegate some of these projects, you’re still going to get to see the outcome of how everything turns out. So when these things are done on a timely basis, your financials are going to also be timely. And then you’ll also be able to then sit down and have a Go to Meeting with your CPA, to talk about the numbers, and that’s where you’ll get to see the results of how your payables look, how your payroll looks, is it too high or too low, and you can still keep in tune with how that’s going. So that’s really the point. The owner still being the end user of this information, just not having to be quite as involved during the process.
What tips do you have for a busy pharmacist to start delegating?
Bonnie: So the number one tip I would have is to eliminate any manual processes that you can in your store. Definitely with back office functions, such as payroll, bill pay, you don’t want to be writing checks, stuffing envelopes. There are so many different apps and programs out there that can be used inexpensively to really save time in that area. And even the middleman process of getting those things going can be delegated to other staff members. So that the pharmacist can just work in the community, work in the store, and just really be the final end user, sign off on those different processes.
Katie: And here at Sykes & Company, we work with pharmacists every day, if they need training, if they need help with implementing these processes and procedures. We work with bookkeepers if they have bookkeepers or we work with them directly to implement the new systems.
