Expiry dates are a purchasing problem

Every practice that has cleared out a supply cupboard knows the feeling: a sealed box of composite, well past date, that someone paid for and nobody used.

The usual response is to check dates more often. That helps a little. It doesn’t address why the box was there in the first place — and the cause is almost always upstream, in how the order was placed.

Four buying habits that produce expired stock

Ordering to a discount rather than to usage. Buy ten, get two free. Excellent, if you use twelve before they expire. For a high-turnover item that’s a saving; for something you use twice a month it’s a slow write-off with a cheerful label on it.

Ordering without checking what’s already in the cupboard. The most common source of duplicates. Two people order independently, neither looks, and now you have eighteen months of supply and twelve months of shelf life.

Ordering the same quantity every time. Standing orders that never get revisited. Usage changes — a hygienist leaves, a material falls out of favour, a technique changes — and the order doesn’t.

Ordering in a hurry. Running out mid-procedure is memorable, so the reflex is to over-order next time. That reflex is rational in the moment and expensive across a year.

Notice that none of these is a stock-checking failure. They are all decisions made at the point of purchase, usually by someone who didn’t have the information they needed.

What a practice manager actually needs to know

Three numbers per item, and most practices have none of them to hand:

• How much we use in a month. Not an impression — an actual rate.
• How much we have. Including the second box in the other room.
• How long the stock on hand will last against its expiry date.

With those three, the order quantity answers itself and the bulk-discount question becomes arithmetic rather than instinct: if twelve units is fourteen months of supply and they expire in nine, the discount is a loss.

First-expiry-first-out, and why it fails

Most clinics intend to use the oldest stock first. In practice the newest delivery goes at the front of the shelf because that’s where the hands are, and the older box migrates backwards until it’s behind something.

Two cheap habits fix most of it:

1. Restock from behind. New stock goes at the back. It takes ten extra seconds and it is the single highest-return change on this list.
2. Mark the month on the front of the box in marker. Large enough to read without picking it up. Nobody reads a small printed date on a shelf; everybody reads a number written in black marker.

The expensive category people forget

Short-dated, low-use, high-cost items — specialist materials, certain anaesthetics, items for procedures you do occasionally. These are where the real money goes, because a single write-off can exceed a year of waste on everyday consumables.

They deserve different treatment: order the smallest viable quantity, even at a worse unit price, and check them monthly rather than at audit. Paying more per unit to waste none is usually the cheaper outcome.

Where to start

If you do one thing: before any order goes out, have one person check what’s on the shelf. Duplicates are the biggest single source of expired stock in most practices and this eliminates them.

If you do a second: write usage rates down for your twenty most-ordered items. It takes an afternoon and it converts every future ordering decision from a guess into a calculation.

The cupboard clear-out is a symptom. The order form is where the money is lost.

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Inventooth is clinical inventory management built for dental practices — supply tracking, usage rates and expiry visibility. More at inventooth.com.