TODO: 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 — its own products, inventory, invoices, and tax setup. Sales, refunds, and reports are scoped 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:
| Where | When 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 page | At the top right of the Dispensary view. Switches which dispensary’s invoices, refunds, and product list you’re looking at. |
| Product list / managing items | Reflects the currently selected dispensary. Switch dispensaries at the top right to manage another one’s items. |
| Charting — Product section | Per chart, on the Product section heading. Pick the dispensary the recommended product belongs to. |
| Financial Reports | After picking the report category — the next dropdown asks which dispensary to report on. |
| Patient Workspace — Products tab | Reflects 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 defaults to your one dispensary — there’s 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 — set the Default Billing Dispensary in the gear panel. See Daily Express Checkout.
- Charting — set the default dispensary per practitioner in Charting Preferences. The Product section in each new chart pre-selects this dispensary.
Defaults are practitioner-level — each practitioner picks their own default. Admin staff sees the default of whichever practitioner they’re working as.
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 can’t 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 by design — 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
A practitioner or admin’s access to each dispensary is set per-dispensary in Office → Practitioners and Staff. Granting access to one dispensary doesn’t grant access to others — each is permissioned independently. An invited practitioner can be granted full access to their own dispensary while being limited to invoices-where-they-are-the-affiliate on the clinic dispensary.
See Dispensary Permissions for the permission model.
Related Pages
- The Dispensary — single-dispensary overview, the starting point if you’re new to dispensaries in OutSmart
- Initial Dispensary Configuration — setting up a new dispensary, including tax setup per dispensary
- Dispensary Permissions — granting practitioner and admin access to each dispensary independently
- Daily Express Checkout — the dashboard card where multi-dispensary patient billing is most visible
- Reporting Overview — which reports are dispensary-scoped and which roll up