Treasury and cash
Its own drawers, its own accounts, its own close. A group-level cash figure hides exactly the problem you opened a second site to watch for.
Blog
Running several branches without losing the thread
Opening a second location is the point at which everything that worked because one person knew it stops working. Not because the second branch is hard, but because the first one was running on shared memory.
What the second branch exposes
Prices that varied slightly by who quoted them. A discount policy that lived in the owner’s head. Stock counted when somebody noticed it was low. A cash drawer reconciled by the person who filled it.
None of those are problems at one site. All of them are problems at two, because the thing that made them work — one person seeing everything — no longer exists.
The instinct is to solve it with reporting. The actual fix is narrower: decide which things must be identical across branches and which are allowed to differ, and then make the system enforce the first list.
What has to be per branch
Stock
Counted and valued per location, with transfers between them recorded as transfers rather than as adjustments.
Permissions
A manager manages their branch. This is the setting clinics get wrong most often, usually by being generous because being precise was hard.
Reporting
Per branch and consolidated, from the same data. Two systems reporting separately is how a group discovers a bad quarter late.
And what must not be
The patient. One record across every location, or the group is just two clinics with a shared logo — and the patient who visits both becomes two people with two balances.
That single decision is most of the value of running a group at all. It is also the one that is nearly impossible to retrofit, which is why it is worth settling before the second branch opens rather than after the third.
Questions
Should each branch have its own account?
No. Separate accounts make the patient two patients and the reporting two reports, which removes the reason for having a group.
Can prices differ between branches?
They can and often should — different cities, different payer mixes. What matters is that the difference is configured deliberately rather than emerging from whoever quoted.
How should stock transfers work?
As a two-sided transfer with both branches recorded, not as a reduction at one end and an increase at the other. Otherwise the two never quite agree.
What does a branch manager need to see?
Their own branch in full, and usually nothing of the others. Owners see everything. Getting this wrong in the generous direction is the most common permissions mistake in a group.
See it on your own clinic
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