Dispensing prescriptions

Work the dispensing queue: dispense, decline an item with a reason, and undo a decline.

The pharmacy portal is a queue. Prescriptions written by your doctors arrive on your dashboard, you check the stock on each medicine, hand the medicines over, and mark the prescription dispensed — which deducts the stock and tells the patient their medicines are ready. This page walks the whole queue, including the two things that trip people up: the payment gate, and what Dispense Anyway really does to your stock.

Pharmacist/c/your-clinic/pharmacist/prescriptions

Before a prescription reaches you

A prescription only becomes yours to dispense once three things are true. If a patient is standing in front of you and their prescription is nowhere to be found, it is almost always one of these.

The doctor has completed the consultation. Prescriptions from a draft or in-progress consultation are invisible to the pharmacy — see Writing a prescription.
An invoice exists for the prescription. Reception or billing raises it — see Invoices.
The invoice has been paid, at least in part. Full payment or a part payment both unlock dispensing. Nothing else does.

The dashboard

Signing in takes you to Pharmacy portal, which opens with how many prescriptions are waiting — for example 3 prescriptions are waiting to be dispensed., or The dispensing queue is clear. The refresh icon in the top bar reloads everything (Dashboard refreshed!), and the two buttons under the greeting jump to Prescriptions and Inventory.

The pharmacy portal dashboard with stat cards, the dispensing queue and the stock health card — Every stat card is a shortcut. Clicking Low stock jumps straight to your inventory alerts, so a morning check of the shelf is two clicks.

Awaiting dispensing: In the queue now — prescriptions still waiting on you. Clicking it opens the prescriptions list filtered to the queue; the status dropdown will look blank, so pick All Status if you want to widen it again.
Dispensed today: Completed today. Clicking it opens the list of dispensed prescriptions.
Total dispensed: All time — everything this clinic has ever handed out.
Low stock: Items at or below minimum, with N near reorder level underneath when some are approaching their reorder point. Clicking it opens Inventory → Alerts.

Below the cards, the Dispensing queue lists each waiting prescription with the patient's name, Dr. {name} · N medicines, how long it has been sitting there (waiting 3h, waiting 2d) and a Dispense button. Click the patient's name to open the full prescription, or View all for the list. Empty, it reads Queue is clear. The side rail carries a Queue cleared gauge (the share of today's workload already dispensed), a Stock health card with View alerts and Purchase orders, and a Dispensed this week chart with a link to Reports.

Finding a prescription

Click Prescriptions in the sidebar. The page is headed Prescriptions / Manage and dispense prescriptions, and each row shows the patient's name, the prescription number (RX-00001), the doctor, the first couple of medicines, the date and a status pill.

The pharmacist prescriptions list with search, status filter, sort control and status pills — A row offers you either a green Dispense button or an amber Payment Pending chip — never both. The chip is your cue to send the patient back to the front desk.

Search patient or doctor…: Searches names only — the patient's or the doctor's. It does not search medicine names or the RX- number.
Status filter: All Status, Awaiting Payment, Ready to Dispense, Dispensed, Declined. Ready to Dispense is the one you live in: it shows exactly the prescriptions whose invoice is paid or part-paid.
Sort: Sort by Date, Sort by Patient or Sort by Status, with an arrow button beside it that flips between ascending and descending.
Refresh: The circular arrow in the top bar reloads the list (Prescriptions refreshed!).

Status pill	What it means	What the row offers you
Awaiting Payment	An invoice exists, but nothing has been paid against it yet.	No button — an amber Payment Pending chip. Send the patient to billing.
Ready to Dispense	The invoice is paid or partly paid. Green light.	Dispense, or the eye icon (View Details) to review first.
Processing	Nothing has been billed for this prescription yet.	A Dispense button appears, but pressing it answers Invoice required until billing raises the invoice.
Dispensed	Handed over. Stock has already been deducted.	View only. A dispensed prescription cannot be re-dispensed, and its items cannot be declined.
Declined	Every item was marked not purchased, so the whole prescription was declined.	View — and you can still revert individual items if the patient changes their mind.
Cancelled	The prescription was cancelled upstream.	View only.

These pills are worked out from the invoice — nobody sets them by hand.

What is on a prescription

Click a row (or the eye icon) to open Prescription Details. The status sits top right — Pending Dispensing, Dispensed or Declined — and everything else on the screen exists to help you hand medicines over safely.

A prescription detail page showing medicine cards, stock chips and the Ready to dispense card — Read the green Available now chip and the teal Dispensing line together: one is what sits on the shelf, the other is exactly what will leave it.

Patient Information: Name, email, phone and address — enough to be sure you are handing the medicines to the right person.
Prescription Details: Prescribed by Dr. {name}, Created on, and — once you are done — Dispensed on, with the date and time in IST.
Medications (N): One card per medicine: its name, chips for dosage form / potency / strength, and Dosage, Frequency, Duration and Quantity.
Available now: The live stock chip — green when you have stock, red when it is zero. If the medicine was never linked to a stock item it reads Available now: not linked to inventory, and nothing will be deducted for that line.
Stock in: {unit}: An amber hint under the quantity, shown when the doctor prescribed in one unit (drams, drops) and you stock the item in another (ml, grams). It warns you that the two numbers are not directly comparable — the app converts them for you.
Dispensing:: The teal box, e.g. 30ml Dropper Bottle × 2 — ₹120.00 (deducts 60 ml from stock). The figure in brackets is the exact quantity that will come off the shelf.
Instructions: The doctor's instructions for that one medicine — worth reading out to the patient.
Notes: The doctor's note on the prescription as a whole, if they left one.

Dispensing

1
Check each medicine against the shelf.
Compare the Available now chip with the (deducts … from stock) figure on the teal Dispensing: line.
2
Decline anything the patient is not buying — before you dispense.
Declined items are skipped by the stock check and are never deducted. See below.
3
Hand the medicines over.
4
Click Mark as Dispensed in the Ready to dispense? card at the bottom.
The card only appears while the prescription is still pending.
5
You see Prescription marked as dispensed.
The status flips to Dispensed, every non-declined medicine is badged Dispensed, a Dispensed on timestamp appears, stock is deducted, and the patient is notified.

When stock is short: Dispense Anyway

If any medicine has less stock than the prescription needs, Mark as Dispensed does not go through. The Insufficient Stock dialog opens instead, listing each short medicine with Available and Requested, and reminding you: You can override this warning if your clinic does not strictly track inventory. Available stock will be deducted.

Cancel — nothing happens at all. The prescription stays pending. Restock it, or decline that item, and come back.
Dispense Anyway — the prescription is dispensed and whatever stock exists is taken off the shelf. Stock is never pushed below zero: if you had 10 ml and needed 60 ml, 10 ml is deducted and the item lands at 0.

Declining an item the patient won't buy

Patients routinely take three of the four medicines. Rather than dispensing everything or nothing, mark the ones they refused as Not Purchased: declined items are struck through, skipped by the stock check, and never deducted.

1
Tick the checkbox on each medicine the patient does not want.
The checkboxes only appear while the prescription is still pending. Select All ticks every pending item at once.
2
Click the red Decline (N) button at the top of the Medications panel.
3
In the Decline Items dialog, add a Reason (optional).
The placeholder suggests the usual ones — e.g., Patient cannot afford, prefers alternative…. The reason really is optional, but it is what a colleague reads later under Reason: on the item.
4
Click Decline Items.
The items are struck through and badged Not Purchased. Everything still pending can be dispensed as normal.

Reverting a decline

The patient changes their mind at the counter. On the declined medicine, click the small circular-arrow button to its right (Revert to pending). The item goes back to pending, its reason is cleared, and it can be dispensed again — you will see 1 item(s) reverted to pending.

Only declined items can be reverted. There is no undo for one you have already dispensed.
The revert button disappears once the prescription is dispensed.
Reverting an item on a fully declined prescription puts the prescription back to pending — but the cancelled invoice stays cancelled.

Who gets notified

What you do	The patient gets	The doctor gets
Mark as Dispensed (including Dispense Anyway)	An email, an in-app notification (Prescription Dispensed — Your prescription has been dispensed and is ready for pickup) and a WhatsApp message listing the medicines.	Nothing.
Decline Items — some items	An in-app notification, Some Medications Declined, naming the medicines.	Nothing.
Decline Items — every item	An in-app notification, Prescription Declined.	Nothing.
Revert to pending	Nothing.	Nothing.

Only the patient is told. If the doctor needs to know a medicine was not purchased, tell them yourself.

The WhatsApp message only goes out if the patient has a phone number on file, and the email only if they have an email address. See Notifications and WhatsApp.

Common questions

Can I dispense before the patient pays?+

No. An invoice must exist and it must be paid or part-paid. A part payment is enough — the prescription turns Ready to Dispense as soon as any amount is recorded against the invoice.

The stock chip says 42 ml but the prescription says 2 drams. Which do I trust?+

Both — they are simply in different units. The amber Stock in: ml hint tells you the units differ, and the teal Dispensing: line does the arithmetic: (deducts 60 ml from stock). That is the number to compare against the chip.

I dispensed the wrong prescription. Can I undo it?+

There is no undo for dispensing. Correct the stock with Adjust Stock in Inventory, and ask an admin to sort out the invoice in Invoices.

Why does one medicine say "not linked to inventory"?+

The doctor typed the medicine in by hand instead of picking one of your stock items, so there is nothing for the system to deduct. You can still dispense the prescription — just adjust that item's stock yourself if you track it.

Am I allowed to change stock myself?+

Yes. Pharmacists have full rights in the inventory module — add items, adjust stock, manage categories and suppliers, and raise purchase orders. See Inventory and stock.

Inventory and stock

Items, batches and expiry, alerts, purchase orders, adjustments, and the transaction log behind every deduction.

Open inventory

Invoices

How a prescription gets billed, and how a part payment unlocks dispensing.

Open billing

Writing a prescription

What the doctor sees at the other end — dosage forms, potencies and dispensing sizes.

See the doctor's side