Free tool
Refill desk workload calculator
Put real hours on the refill requests your front desk handles every week, and see how much of that time is the phone rather than the pharmacy.
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Refill revenue leakage calculator
Work out how much heartworm, thyroid, and long term medication margin walks out of your clinic each year, and how much of it is realistically recoverable.
Script leakage is hard to see because it is invisible in your own numbers. A client who buys the next heartworm box somewhere else does not generate a line in your dispensing report. Nothing is missing on the shelf. The only trace is a maintenance patient whose refill count for the year is lower than the arithmetic says it should be, and that gap only appears if somebody goes looking for it.
This calculator makes the gap explicit. Put in the size of your maintenance caseload, how often those patients should be refilling, and the margin you keep on an in house fill. Then be honest about the share going elsewhere and how much of it a reminder before the last dose could plausibly recover. The result is an annual figure, net of what the tracking software costs.
Your result
Refills your caseload should generate each year
1,680
This is the denominator every compliance conversation should start from.
Dispensing margin leaving the clinic each year
$12,936
The margin attached to refills your caseload needed but your shelf did not fill.
Margin a reminder cadence could win back
$3,881
Only the share of leakage caused by forgetting rather than by price shopping.
Recovered margin after software cost
$3,341
Annual recovery less twelve months of whatever you pay to track due dates.
Treat these as a planning estimate to test against one quarter of real dispensing data, not as an audited figure.
Finding your real leakage percentage
The honest way to get the outside share is the doses sold against doses needed comparison. Pull the number of heartworm doses your clinic dispensed over the last twelve months, then count active canine patients and multiply by twelve. The shortfall is not all leakage, since some of it is genuine non compliance, but the two together are exactly what you are trying to fix.
Do the same for your thyroid caseload with a shorter horizon. Count cats on methimazole, multiply by the days supply you normally send, and see how many refills those patients should have collected. A cat that should have refilled six times and refilled twice is either lapsed or buying elsewhere, and either answer needs the same phone call.
Why the recapture figure should stay modest
The temptation is to put the recapture share high, because every clinic believes its clients would prefer to buy locally. Some would. Owners who moved for price and found the ordering easy are not coming back because you sent a note, and a plan built on that assumption disappoints everyone at the quarterly review.
The recoverable group is narrower and more reliable: owners who simply lost track. They are the ones whose dog is now two months uncovered and who feel bad about it when reminded. Those clients respond to a message that arrives a week before the last dose, names the pet, and tells them the box is on the shelf. Start conservative, measure a quarter, and raise the number only if your own data supports it.
Questions about this calculator
What margin figure should we use if our formulary is mixed?
Take a weighted average across your top handful of maintenance products rather than your best seller. Heartworm boxes, thyroid tablets, and long term NSAIDs usually carry different spreads. A blended figure produces a more defensible annual number.
Does this account for clients we would lose entirely?
Indirectly, through the recapture share. Set that input low if your area has heavy price competition. The calculator deliberately separates total leakage from the part a reminder can address, because those are very different numbers.
Our practice software already reports on this. Why use a calculator?
Most dispensing reports show what you sold, not what your caseload needed. The gap between those two figures is the whole point. This calculator gives you the second number so the comparison is possible.
More free tools and working documents
Working document
The refill authorization checklist
One page your front desk can work through for every refill request, from the moment the owner calls to the moment the next due date is on the calendar.
Test that result against your own dispensing history
The figure above is only as good as the inputs you typed over the defaults. Bring it to a live walkthrough and we will set it beside your real doses sold, your recheck intervals, and the refill requests your front desk fielded last week. If your own arithmetic says the gap is too small to chase, we will tell you that.