A patient finishes her treatment, walks to reception and asks for the cleanser she bought last time. Your receptionist checks the shelf, then the cupboard, then the box under the desk. It has gone. Nobody noticed the last one leave, because the only record of it was a clipboard on the back of the stockroom door.
Plenty of clinics run a small retail range of skincare and home-care products and still track it on paper or in a spreadsheet that someone updates when they remember. It works until a busy month, and then the best-sellers run out first.
Here is how retail stock works in Clinic Membership: adding products, counting the shelf, low-stock alerts and selling at the till so the numbers stay up to date.
Why the clipboard stops working
A clipboard or spreadsheet only knows what someone tells it. Every sale, every delivery and every broken bottle needs a second job: writing it down somewhere else. On a Saturday with a full diary, that is the first thing to slip.
You find out a product has sold out when a patient asks for it. You reorder in a panic, or over-order the things that were never moving. And the stock count waits for a spare afternoon that never comes.
The fix is keeping stock where you sell it, so selling a product and counting it become the same action.
Setting up your retail products
In Clinic Membership, retail stock is everything you sell at the till: skincare, kits and other shop items. You find it under Sales, then Stock (or Admin, then Stock), on the Retail products tab.
To add a product, click New product and enter its name, price and SKU. Choose a supplier, or add a new one on the spot, and decide whether you want to track stock for that item. If you run more than one site, you set the quantity and a reorder alert level for each location, so each clinic has its own count.
Once saved, it appears in Sales under Stock. The manage retail stock guide walks through each screen.
If your list already lives in a spreadsheet, you do not have to retype it. Stock settings (the gear icon beside the tabs on the Stock page) include a CSV import with a preview and a column map, so you can check your catalogue before it lands. You can export it the same way.
Search accepts a product name, SKU, supplier or a phrase like "low stock", and the filter shows all, low, out-of-stock or no-supplier items.
Keeping track of suppliers
It helps to see at a glance who supplies what. Under Sales, then Stock, then Suppliers, click New supplier and enter the name. The supplier then appears in the list with a count of its products.
Open a supplier to assign or unassign products, or set the supplier on a product's edit page. If you are tidying up after an import, the No supplier filter on the Retail products tab shows every item still missing one.
It does not place orders for you, but it makes reordering quicker: everything from one supplier sits in one list. The stock suppliers guide has the detail.
Stock takes without the stress
A stock take is where the system and the shelf agree again. On the Retail products tab, click Stock take and choose the location you are counting. For each product you see what Clinic Membership thinks you have, next to a box for the counted quantity.
Count the shelf, enter what you find and click Save stock take. Only the rows that changed are written to the audit trail, marked as adjusted at stock take, so you can see later exactly where the differences were.
Between stock takes, open any product to adjust its quantity for a location when a delivery arrives or a bottle breaks. Each product keeps a movement history.
Because sales at the till reduce stock automatically, a stock take becomes a quick check rather than a full recount.
Low-stock alerts before a best-seller runs out
This is the part that replaces the "we've run out" moment at reception. In Stock settings, under Stock ownership and alerts, you choose who is responsible for stock. That can be the same person for every location, or a different person for each site.
When an item hits its reorder level, it goes onto that person's low-stock email. The email is one weekly list of everything currently out of stock or running low for their location, sent at most once a week. One short list, not a flood of messages, and it arrives before the shelf is empty if your reorder levels are sensible.
For a product that sells steadily, set the alert high enough to cover your supplier's delivery time. For slow sellers, a lower level is fine. You can see how to set it all up in the stock settings and low-stock alerts guide.
Selling skincare at the till
Stock only stays accurate if the till and the shelf are connected. In Sales, open the Stock tab on a sale and add the products the patient is buying. Quantities reduce when the invoice is paid, so there is nothing to write down afterwards. We cover the wider checkout flow in how to run your clinic POS and invoicing.
Reception teams tend to love this next part. When a patient has bought retail products before, the Products tab shows a Previously purchased row above the catalogue, as long as the search box is empty. Each card shows the product name, its current price, how many units the patient has bought in total and when they last ordered it. One tap adds it to the basket.
So "the serum I had last time" needs no guesswork. If that product is out of stock or archived, the card appears greyed out and cannot be added, which is a gentle prompt to check the low-stock list. The reorder at checkout guide shows what each card means.
Seeing what sells and what sits
Once your products are in and selling, reports tell you which ones earn their shelf space. Open Dashboard and reports, use Manual report and pick a stock report, then run it or download it as a CSV or PDF.
The Retail stock report shows tracked products, low stock, out of stock and recent units sold. The Retail stock movement report covers roughly the last 90 days: units sold, slow movers, idle units and their retail value, and units received or adjusted.
Read that second report before you reorder. If a product has barely moved, you may not need another box. If something sells faster than you thought, raise its reorder level. The stock reports guide lists each report.
What about professional stock?
This guide is about retail products, but if you also want injectable and professional stock alongside your clinical records, Clinic Membership shows professional stock on a separate tab when Documenti, our connected EMR, is linked, and we explain how the two work together in the power of an EMR for UK aesthetic clinics.
Where to start this week
You do not need to set up everything in one go. A sensible first week looks like this:
- List your retail range. Start with the products you sell most, or import your existing spreadsheet as a CSV.
- Add your suppliers. Assign each product so reordering is one list per supplier.
- Set reorder levels. Think about delivery times for your best-sellers first.
- Choose your stock owner. Decide who receives the weekly low-stock email for each location.
- Do one stock take. Count the shelf once so the system starts from the truth.
- Sell through the till. From then on, every paid invoice keeps the count up to date.
What changes for the team
The clipboard comes off the stockroom door. Reception stops apologising for empty shelves, because the person responsible saw the low-stock email days ago. And when a patient asks for the product she had last time, it is one tap away.
Clinic Membership brings retail stock, suppliers, low-stock alerts and checkout together with your patients, calendar and memberships. Free covers up to 10 patient records. See pricing for paid plans.
