Tracking Costs of Courier and Medical Sample Delivery in Pharmaceutical Companies

Pharmaceutical companies regularly send medical samples, documents, marketing materials, and other approved items to different cities and territories. Though the cost of single delivery may seem insignificant, packing and repeated delivery can significantly add up.

Effective expense management software will allow the commercial operations team to organize these expenses by shipments, territories, purpose and urgency. Also, it will allow the finance team to get more insight into pharmaceutical company expenses and make reporting easier.

Why Courier Costs Require Better Tracking

Courier expenses consist of more than the delivery fee. The cost of medical sample dispatch will include packing, picking up, transport, additional handling, and urgent delivery.

With expense management software, each shipment will be tied to a territory, employee, product, purpose, and delivery type. This will allow getting more spend transparency for pharmaceutical companies and identify the places where distribution expenses grow.

Also, detailed audit-ready expense reports will give the finance team a complete view of dispatch expenses without having to rely on consolidated invoices of couriers.

Track Shipments by Territory and Purpose

Having a clear expense structure will help you see where the expenses related to pharmaceutical distribution come from.

Shipments can be categorized into:

• Medical sample dispatch
• Promotional material
• Documentation
• Territory replenishment
• Standard delivery
• Urgent delivery
• Return shipment

A good pharma expense policy must include all the details about what shipments are allowed, who can initiate the shipments and what supporting documents are necessary.

With the help of expense management software, you can enforce your policy and ensure better consistency of spending and healthcare compliance expense management.

Identify Repeat Deliveries

Repeat deliveries are one of the major cost drivers. The shipments can be resent due to an incorrect address, unsuccessful delivery, damaged packaging, or incomplete request.

Analyzing shipments can allow you to detect territories with a disproportionately high number of repeat-deliveries expenses.

For example, if there are several deliveries to the same territory and for the same purpose during a short period, commercial operations can analyze the reason and find out whether there is an opportunity for improving the process.

This will ensure better spend transparency for pharmaceutical companies and mae audit-ready expense reports even more effective.

Monitor Emergency Shipping

There is a good chance that urgent deliveries will cost substantially more compared to regular delivery. In case a last-minute sample request or another factor leads to emergency shipping, companies may end up paying for premium delivery services.

Any pharma expense policy must specify the situations when emergency shipping is acceptable and what approval levels should be set.

The use of expense management software allows tagging of all emergency shipping charges and enables comparisons between routine and urgent shipping expenses.

Additionally, a pharmaceutical regulatory compliance expenses policy can leverage this solution for maintaining a traceable documentation of sensitive expenses.

Maintain Compliance and Documentation

Pharmaceutical companies must have appropriate documentation on expenses related to sampling, payments to health care professionals and commercial activities.

Healthcare compliance expense management software will allow capturing such information as the requesting party, purpose, destination, amount of money involved, receipt of payment and approval process.

An appropriately designed pharma expense policy may include documentation requirements for various categories of expenses.

When the expenses are tied to sensitive interactions or third parties, the company may use anti-bribery expense controls and pharma practices that were created by its team for the compliance strategy.

How Expendesk Helps

Expendesk enables digital receipts scanning with OCR, automated policy enforcement, approval process, duplicate checking, auditing and real-time visibility of all expenses.

These functions enable pharmaceutical firms to consolidate expenses and make reporting more consistent.

To manage the expenditures incurred on couriers and sample delivery, expense management software can be used to collect receipts, categorize expenses and route the claims through the right approval process.

Real-time reporting will facilitate spend transparency for pharmaceutical companies, while digitized receipts can help to compile audit-ready expense reports faster.

The same workflow can be used to enforce healthcare compliance expense management by making sure that the right documents and approvals are in place for relevant transactions.

Turn Dispatch Data Into Cost Control

The point of expense tracking is not only to collect courier invoices. The company should analyze why the shipments happen, which regions incur higher expenses and whether there are repeating emergencies or deliveries.

Through the use of expense management software along with an established pharma expense policy, pharmaceutical firms can enhance the transparency of their costs of distribution without compromising on controls.

Good reporting capabilities will enable pharmaceutical regulatory compliance expenses to be covered, while proper anti-bribery expense controls and pharma mechanisms may help with oversight.

With courier, packing, and emergency fees being segregated according to shipments, regions, and uses, pharmaceutical firms can leverage normal dispatch records for valuable information.