For a pharmacy, a supermarket or a shop selling baby food and dairy, an expiry date is not a label detail. It is money with a deadline. Every pack that passes its date on the shelf has been bought, stored, insured and counted, and then has to be removed, recorded and destroyed. The discipline that prevents this is called FEFO, first expiry first out, and it is a stock method as much as a shelving habit.
What the standards say
The Pharmaceutical Society of Uganda's Standards of Pharmacy Practice for Retail Pharmacies set out the expectations for a licensed pharmacy, and they translate well to any business with perishable stock:
- Stock rotation should follow a FEFO or FIFO basis.
- All purchases should be received against formal delivery notes that record the product name, brand, quantity, batch number and expiry date.
- There should be a designated, lockable area for expired, damaged and rejected products, clearly labelled, with the keys held by the pharmacist.
- Procurement documents should be kept for a minimum of one year after the expiry of the products they relate to.
- Stock taking should happen monthly under supervision, and the standards say suitable software should preferably be used for stock management.
The thread running through all of these is that expiry has to be captured at the moment stock arrives, not discovered at the moment it is sold.
Capture expiry at receiving
FEFO fails most often at the back door. A delivery arrives, the quantities are checked, and the stock goes straight to the shelf with its expiry date known only to whoever unpacked it. Three habits fix this:
- Record the batch number and expiry date for every line on the goods received note, as the pharmacy standards require. If a supplier delivers one product in two batches with two dates, receive them as two lines.
- Reject or query anything that arrives with a shorter shelf life than agreed. Many wholesalers will accept a return at delivery; few will accept it a month later.
- Shelve new stock behind the old. This is the physical half of FEFO and it has to be the rule for whoever packs the shelves, including the owner.
Set alert windows that match your sell-through
An expiry alert is useful only if it fires while you can still act. For a product that sells ten units a week, a warning three months out gives you time to run a promotion or return the stock. For a product that sells one unit a quarter, a three-month warning is already too late, and the right decision may be to stop ordering it altogether.
Set the alert window per category rather than per shop. Fresh dairy might need seven days, over-the-counter medicines ninety, tinned goods one hundred and eighty. Review the windows after each monthly count by looking at what expired without ever triggering a useful alert.
Decide what to do with short-dated stock
Once a line is inside its alert window there are four honest options: sell it faster through a visible price reduction, return it to the supplier where terms allow, transfer it to a branch that moves it quicker, or write it off. What is never an option is selling it after the date.
Accounting rules back up the early decision. Under IAS 2, inventories are measured at the lower of cost and net realisable value, and a write-down to net realisable value is recognised as an expense in the period it occurs. Stock you can only sell at a discount is already worth less in your books, whether or not you have changed the shelf price.
Write off and destroy properly
Expired stock has to be removed from the saleable shelf the day it expires, moved to the lockable quarantine area and recorded. Post the stock adjustment with a clear reason ("expired, batch X, qty Y") so that the quantity on the system matches what is left on the shelf and the month's variance report is honest.
If your business issues EFRIS receipts, remember that URA's EFRIS stock function expects adjustments too. URA's guidance states that EFRIS caters for damaged stock through stock adjustment, allowing a taxpayer to remove damaged stock, burnt stock or any other adjustment with reasons. Expired stock is one of those reasons.
Keep the destruction paperwork with the adjustment record. For a pharmacy, the certificate of destruction is part of licensing compliance; for a food shop it is simply the evidence that supports the write-off in your accounts.
A weekly FEFO checklist
- Walk the alert list every Monday and decide on each line: discount, return, transfer or write off.
- Check that the oldest date is at the front on five random shelves.
- Reconcile the quarantine area against posted adjustments.
- Note any supplier who delivered short-dated stock, and raise it at the next order.
The aim is a shop where the question "when does this expire?" is answered by the system before a customer ever has to ask it at the counter.
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