RxCore

The Problem

Most inventory software treats a paracetamol 500mg tablet and a paracetamol 250mg suspension as the same product. Pharmacies don't. A single drug exists across multiple combinations of brand name, generic name, manufacturer, dosage form, strength, and pack size — each with its own pricing, storage requirement, and dispensing logic. General-purpose stock tools don't handle this correctly. Purpose-built pharmacy systems that do are priced for hospital procurement departments, not independent or small-chain pharmacies.

What We Built

RxCore is built around a proper pharmaceutical product hierarchy: active ingredient → dosage form → strength → brand/generic → pack size → batch. This means the system handles brand-to-generic substitution correctly, tracks FIFO dispensing per batch with automatic near-expiry alerts, flags when multiple formulations of the same drug are simultaneously in stock, and maintains a full dispensing audit trail per item. Sales recording captures what was sold, from which batch, and to whom. The current version covers inventory and sales; the architecture is already designed for the next phases — supplier and procurement tracking, drug-drug interaction checking at the point of dispensing, and a search layer for sourcing rare and orphaned drugs not available through standard supply chains.

The Outcome

What We Learned

The hardest problem wasn't the UI or the database technology — it was agreeing on the data model. Getting the pharmaceutical hierarchy right took more iteration than anything else in the build. Once it was correct, everything else followed naturally. A wrong data model creates the kind of technical debt you can't refactor your way out of.