Billing for your medical store in Manipur
A strip, four loose tablets and a clinic's list: each on a correct bill, each family's month on a page.
Tools for a counter that sells medicines by the strip, the tablet and the bottle
GST bills
A clinic's bill with strips and loose tablets as separate lines, GST worked out on every line.
Low stock warnings
The daily medicines of the elders, listed as short before the Saturday market, so a strip never runs out on the day the village comes down.
Orders to suppliers
The order to the wholesaler in Imphal and a note of what came, kept with its date.
From the half-strip to the clinic's GST bill
The bill that goes home as a list for the doctor
A man from a hill village carries medicines home for three households. Each bill names its medicines and the number of strips, so the paper he carries is a list he can show the doctor at the next visit, and the doctor sees what each household has really been taking.
How many weeks an elder has taken the same strips
The page shows which strips the elder has taken and for how many weeks. When the family asks how much to bring down for the month, and when the wholesaler asks how many boxes of those strips to hold, you answer from the weeks on the page and not from what you happen to remember.
The wholesaler's representative finds the Saturday list ready
The representative from Imphal arrives on Monday and finds the list ready: the daily medicines the hill families took on Saturday, how many of each are left, and the order for the week started from that. He does not have to guess what to send.
Why a medical counter in Manipur counts tablets as well as strips
The customer who names the medicine by its colour
A customer asks for the red one or the small white one, because that is how he knows his father's tablets. You know most of them, and for the others you ask him to describe the strip. A wrong guess costs a trip back up the hill. Many customers come down from the hills for the day and carry back a month's medicines, so a mistake at the counter is carried home across the valley.
The neighbour who collects the elder's strips
A neighbour collects the elder's strips every week, and the family that pays has never seen a bill. When the family asks what the month came to, you cannot say which week the neighbour took what. The son is a good son, and the elder is well cared for, but a notebook cannot show a family who paid for which week. On the days a family comes down from the hills, the bags are heavy and the day is short, and nobody wants to stand while a notebook is searched.
The week everyone buys two months at once
When word spreads that the highway is blocked, families buy double: two months of the strips they take every day, in one visit. The shelf is bare by evening, and the elder who comes down the next morning finds none. Nobody can say afterwards who bought how much, and that makes the next order a guess made in a hurry.
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Hill villages and a border town: whom a Manipur medical store serves
A medical store serves the people who come in from around it, in the valley and in the hills.
- In Ukhrul, cultivators are 64.6% of main workers (2011 Census), agricultural labourers 4.4% and household-industry workers 2.5%.
- Moreh, the international trade centre of Manipur, lies at the southern end of Chandel, a border district with Myanmar.
- In Senapati, agriculture is the main occupation and 80% of the area is forest.
- Imphal East has 45,346 business establishments (Economic Census 2013).
Questions Manipur medical stores ask
Two hill families share a name and take the same strips. How do I send each bill to the right phone?
Give each page the number of its own phone. The bill goes to that number, so the family that took the strips is the one that reads it, and the other family never sees it.
A visitor to Imphal for the hospital carries the doctor's paper home. What can he read beside it?
The doctor's paper says what to take; only the bill says what was bought. Ask for the home number before he leaves and send the bill there, so on the long hill road home nothing is lost on paper and the family reads what he carries.
I stock a few medicines for animals. Can they sit in a row of their own?
Yes. Name them plainly and each is its own item. The daily report keeps their row apart from the medicines for people.
In a week of fear a family buys two months of strips. Can I see who took double?
Yes. Each family's page lists every take with its day, so a double take shows as two months in one line. The item's count shows what is left on the shelf, and you can set the remaining strips aside for the families who depend on them.
May 2023 on the two highways into Manipur
The Imphal-Dimapur and Imphal-Jiribam highways are the two lifelines of landlocked Manipur; in May 2023 about 12 medicine trucks were stranded between Mao and Senapati. A shop that stocks medicines depends on those two roads.
The Manipur Chemists and Druggists Association said in May 2023 that panic buying and hoarding worsened a shortage of life-saving drugs in the state. In such weeks a shop owner needs to know exactly what is on the shelf and who has taken how much.