Replace the dental supply spreadsheet with one inventory and reorder workflow.
A custom first release for a dental practice or group that already has a supply process but cannot trust the spreadsheet, cabinet count, purchase trail, or reorder handoff.
- First-release range
- $15k–$30k
- Likely timeline
- Usually 4–8 weeks
- Buyer
- A practice owner, operations lead, or supply coordinator with a named owner for counts and reordering.
The real failure is not a missing dashboard. It is that staff cannot answer what is on hand, what moved, what expires next, what has already been ordered, and who must reorder it without checking several places.
- Counts are updated in a spreadsheet after the physical stock has already changed.
- Low stock becomes an emergency order because reorder levels and responsibility are unclear.
- Purchases, receipts, use, waste, adjustments, and transfers do not form one audit trail.
- Batch or lot details and expiry dates are detached from the quantities staff can see.
- Several offices cannot separate central purchasing from office-level stock and transfer responsibility.
A related operating model you can inspect
The image is transferable implementation evidence. The caption states the boundary.
The records people manage and the actions they take
Records
- Supply item, category, unit of measure, supplier reference, and preferred reorder quantity
- Practice, office, room, cabinet, or other agreed stock location
- On-hand balance derived from receipts, use, transfers, counts, waste, and corrections
- Minimum, reorder, and target levels by location
- Purchase request, purchase order, expected receipt, and received quantities
- Batch or lot identifier, received date, expiry date, and current quantity where required
- Staff role, approval owner, reason code, timestamp, and audit history
Actions
- Import the agreed item catalog and verified opening counts
- Receive a purchase into a location and batch or lot record
- Record use, waste, correction, count reconciliation, and office-to-office transfer
- Build a reorder list from current balances and agreed thresholds
- Request, approve, order, receive, and close a purchase without losing the handoff
- Review location-level stock, movement, expiry, purchasing, and audit exports
- Catalog and opening count
- Receipt or transfer
- Use, waste, or correction
- Current balance
- Reorder decision
- Purchase and receipt
- Report and audit
The smallest release that can replace the broken handoff
- One-time build range
- $15k–$30k
- Likely timeline
- Usually 4–8 weeks
One practice, one accountable inventory workflow, one usable item catalog, and the smallest set of locations, roles, movements, reorder rules, purchases, and reports needed to replace the current spreadsheet.
Range assumptions
- One person can approve item definitions, movement rules, roles, and acceptance decisions.
- The current spreadsheet or export is available and can be reconciled to a physical opening count.
- The first release does not include patient records or clinical decision-making.
- Multi-office rules, hardware, and external integrations are priced after their real interfaces are inspected.
The range is planning guidance, not a quote or availability promise. Data condition, migration risk, integrations, permissions, hardware, several teams, and production responsibility can change it after inspection.
What must be understood before these are scoped
- CSV import and export are the default boundary. Supplier, accounting, or practice-management integrations require API or file samples, credentials, ownership, and failure rules before they enter scope.
- Barcode or QR scanning can be added only after the device, label, browser, and fallback workflow are tested. Hardware purchasing and onsite installation are separate.
- Migration uses an agreed item map, a frozen source export, opening-count reconciliation, and an exception report. A row count alone is not acceptance evidence.
- For several offices, the scope must define central versus office purchasing, who can transfer stock, who owns counts, and which reports cross location boundaries.
- Hosting, backups, retention, and recovery are deployed into an agreed customer-controlled account. Production support is separate from the first build.
Relevant experience and proof from the system
Paid dental-sector work, without an inventory deployment claim.
Across a historical multi-milestone dental engagement, I handled redirect consolidation, homepage authority-hub JSON-LD, removal of conflicting LocalBusiness/Dentist output, rendered business-data alignment, technical QA documentation, and Google Ads conversion-tracking cleanup.
What this establishes: The evidence is private/redactable, so the client identity and account material are omitted. It proves paid dental-sector technical work and documented outputs. It does not prove that the inventory system below was deployed for a dentist, or that rankings, rich results, conversions, or revenue improved.
Purchasing, FIFO batches, stock movements, and restocking already work in another operating model.
The working food-operations system connects products, purchases, FIFO stock batches, recipes, sales, spoilage, actual counts, corrections, restock targets, exports, workspace access, and operator administration. The public read-only demo uses synthetic records and disables persistent actions.
What this establishes: This proves the implemented inventory state model and visible workflow. It is transferable proof, not dental deployment proof, regulatory certification, production-scale evidence for a group practice, or a measured operator outcome.
Keep the first release focused on the operating job
- Clinical recommendations, diagnosis, treatment, prescribing, or other patient-care decisions
- Regulatory, privacy, sterilization, recall, or controlled-substance certification
- Patient records or protected health information in the first release
- A full ERP, accounting suite, dental practice-management system, or supplier marketplace
- Unverified automatic reordering, demand forecasting, or supplier-price claims
- Onsite hardware installation or support unless a local partner is separately contracted
Send the current operating facts
One practice or a multi-location group buying and consuming supplies for its own operations. This is not a supplier marketplace or a clinical-record system.
Answer these questions
- How many practices, offices, stock rooms, and people change inventory?
- Who owns counts, reorder decisions, purchase approval, receiving, and transfers today?
- Which records exist now, and which spreadsheet, export, supplier, accounting, or practice-management boundaries matter?
- Which items require lot, batch, expiry, recall, serial, or other traceability?
- What must the first release make reliable, and what can remain manual?
Minimum acceptance conditions
- A named operational owner can define the current workflow and accept the release.
- The source catalog and opening-count process can be inspected before migration is priced.
- Clinical, compliance, patient-data, hardware, and integration responsibilities can be kept explicit.