What you need to run AdohPharma

AdohPharma is a web application. There is nothing to install, no server to run, and no per-till licence — but a dispensing system has real requirements, and they are worth checking before you commit.

Devices

Any reasonably modern device with a current browser: a laptop or desktop at the counter, a tablet for walking the shelves during a count, a phone for checking stock away from the till. The counting and receiving screens are built for a small screen held in one hand, because that is the shape of the job. Barcodes are read with the device's own camera, with manual entry always available for the devices and lighting conditions where that does not work — so no dedicated scanner hardware is required to start.

Connectivity

AdohPharma assumes your connection will drop, and is designed around it rather than apologising for it. The till keeps selling with no internet — sales are written to the device and merged when you reconnect — and counting a shelf works the same way. What genuinely needs a connection is anything that reads across the whole business at once: tracing a recalled batch, approving a loss against live stock, and reporting.

The practical requirement is therefore modest: enough connectivity that a device syncs at some point during the day, not continuous coverage in every corner of the shop.

Payment rails

Cash and card are recorded without any integration. For mobile money, AdohPharma supports M-Pesa using your own merchant credentials — the money moves between your customer and your till, and we never sit in the middle of it. You will need your paybill or till number and API credentials from Safaricom before mobile money can be switched on.

Your people

Access is role-based across four roles — owner, pharmacist, assistant and cashier — and each maps to a set of permissions the server enforces, not merely a menu that hides things. An owner can move individual permissions for their own organisation without changing anybody's role, which matters for the shapes real sites come in: a two-person shop where the cashier also receives stock, or a hospital where only the pharmacy may touch prices.

A single-operator site works fine. Some controls — approving a write-off, signing off a stock take — are built around two people, and where a solo owner would otherwise be locked out of their own business, they are not.

Your data

The one real piece of preparation is your opening position: your product catalogue and what is currently on your shelves. Both can be loaded from a spreadsheet in a single pass, with a template provided and a review step before anything is written. Batch-level detail — lot number, expiry date, cost — is what makes expiry tracking and recall tracing work, so it is worth capturing at the point of import rather than backfilling later.

Your records remain yours. A full export is always available, including if you stop paying — see Security.

How long setup takes

Branches and staff are minutes. The catalogue import is the long pole and depends entirely on the state of the data you are bringing — a clean spreadsheet is an afternoon, a shoebox of supplier invoices is not. Most sites are dispensing on day one and finish tidying batch detail over the first week.

What happens after you sign up

Every account starts on a free trial with no card, with room for 6 branches, so you can model your real business rather than a cut-down version of it. If you run more shops than that, you do not need to talk to anybody first: Ultimate has no branch limit and you can subscribe to it from the pricing page whenever you are ready. Once you are in, the Help section in the dashboard sidebar walks through each job step by step — setting up, receiving a delivery, selling offline, closing a till, counting a shelf, writing off stock and handling a recall.

Next, read the modules to see what each part of the product covers.