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OutSmart Guide

Managing Multiple Dispensaries

A single OutSmart office can run more than one dispensary at the same time. The most common pattern is a clinic-owned dispensary alongside one or more practitioner-owned dispensaries (where each practitioner manages their own product set and books their own sales). Each dispensary is its own set of books, with its own products, inventory, invoices and tax setup. Sales, refunds and reports apply only to the dispensary you pick when you start the action.

This page covers how dispensary selection works across the places it shows up.

Where You Pick a Dispensary

Many actions across OutSmart ask you which dispensary you mean before they proceed. The patterns:

WhereWhen you pick
Express Checkout card (Dashboard)Per patient, in the Select Dispensary column. Choose before you start adding items to that patient’s invoice.
Transactions pageAt the top right of the Dispensary view. Switches which dispensary’s invoices, refunds, and product list you’re looking at.
Product list / managing itemsReflects the currently selected dispensary. Switch dispensaries at the top right to manage another one’s items.
Charting, Product sectionPer chart, on the Product section heading. Pick the dispensary the recommended product belongs to.
Financial ReportsAfter you pick the report category, the next dropdown asks which dispensary to report on.
Patient Workspace, Products tabReflects all dispensaries the patient has been billed in. Each line item shows which dispensary it came from.

If you have only one dispensary, the dispensary picker still appears but it defaults to your one dispensary, so there is nothing to switch.

Setting a Default Dispensary

For places where you’d otherwise pick the same dispensary every time, you can set a default that auto-fills:

  • Express Checkout. Open the card’s gear panel and set Default Billing Dispensary. See Daily Express Checkout.
  • The patient workspace. Click the gear at the top of a patient’s workspace and set Default Dispensary For Product Ordering. That is the dispensary used when you order a product from that page.

Both defaults belong to the person who sets them, so everyone at the clinic chooses their own.

When Items From Different Dispensaries Appear Together

Express Checkout pulls billable items from a patient’s calendar appointments, chart recommendations, and existing invoices for the day. If the patient was recommended products from multiple dispensaries, all of them appear in the patient’s row.

When you’ve selected a billing dispensary for that patient’s invoice, items from the other dispensaries grey out. You cannot bill across dispensaries in a single invoice, because each dispensary keeps its own books. To bill items from a second dispensary, create a second invoice: change the Select Dispensary column, click New Invoice again, and bill the second set of items there.

This is deliberate, because a single invoice can only credit one dispensary’s books. See Daily Express Checkout for the worked example with a clinic dispensary alongside a practitioner-owned dispensary.

Permissions Across Dispensaries

Access is set one dispensary at a time, from inside the dispensary itself. Open the dispensary, click Dispensary Settings, then Access Permissions.

Only the practitioner who created a dispensary can set its permissions. Nobody else sees that menu option, so if you cannot find it on a dispensary, it is not yours.

Granting somebody access to one dispensary gives them nothing on any other, because each one is set on its own. A practitioner can have the run of their own dispensary while being limited to a few actions on the clinic’s.

See Dispensary Permissions for the permission model.