Pharmacy Connect 2026 | Sydney
At Pinn Deavin, we have developed a niche in servicing pharmacy clients, building specialist knowledge and experience in the financial, operational and commercial issues that are unique to pharmacy businesses. Pharmacy is not like every other business, and we believe pharmacy owners benefit from advisers who genuinely understand the industry, its economics and the environment in which they operate.
That is why attending Pharmacy Connect 2026 in Sydney was important to me. It was another opportunity to immerse ourselves in our clients’ world, to listen to the conversations happening within the industry and better understand the challenges, opportunities and changes pharmacy owners are navigating.
I attended wearing my accountant and business adviser hat, but I came away struck by just how many of the challenges facing community pharmacy mirror those facing the accounting profession.
Both are trusted professions. Both operate in increasingly regulated environments. Both are being reshaped by technology. Both are experiencing pressure on traditional revenue models and increasing expectations from clients or patients. And, importantly, both professions are being challenged to move beyond their traditional scope and demonstrate greater value.
“The opportunity is there. The challenge is creating the capacity to pursue it.”
The service is the service. The product is the product.
One of my notes from the conference simply reads: “Products drive transactions. Services build trust.”
That resonates strongly with me because the same principle applies to accounting.
Pharmacy has traditionally been heavily associated with the product being dispensed. Accounting has traditionally been associated with the tax return, financial statements or BAS being produced. But the product is only the mechanism through which part of the service is delivered.
The real value sits in the relationship, professional judgement, knowledge and trust.
For pharmacy, the expansion into full-scope practice makes that distinction increasingly important. Pharmacists are already providing established services such as vaccinations, medication reviews and other professional services, while expanded scope continues to create new opportunities for pharmacists to use their clinical expertise.
Accounting is travelling down a remarkably similar path. Technology can process transactions, reconcile bank accounts and automate parts of compliance. But technology does not replace the trusted adviser who understands the business owner, their objectives, their risks and what they are trying to achieve.
Full scope requires capacity
Perhaps the biggest question for pharmacy owners is not whether there are opportunities. It is whether they have the capacity to implement them.
A pharmacy owner might see the opportunity to introduce a new professional service, develop a consultation culture, undertake additional training or become a full-scope provider.
But implementation becomes difficult when that same owner is also responsible for rostering, payroll, creditors, bookkeeping, BAS, cash flow, dealing with the bank and answering questions about why last month’s numbers do not look right.
And when a key administration or finance employee goes on leave or moves on, suddenly the owner can find themselves back to processing wages for the fortnight. That is not the highest and best use of a pharmacist owner’s time.
One of the themes I took from Pharmacy Connect was the importance of backfilling roles and building systems around the owner. A sustainable pharmacy should not depend upon one person being available to perform every critical function.
This is equally true of the finance function. Strategic outsourcing can move bookkeeping, payroll, accounts payable, management reporting, budgeting and compliance away from the owner’s desk and into a structured finance function. The objective is not simply to outsource tasks. It is to reduce key-person dependency and give the owner back the capacity to focus on the pharmacy.
Know what is happening in your pharmacy
Creating capacity does not mean losing control. In fact, the right systems and reporting should give a pharmacy owner greater visibility and control, with less involvement in the day-to-day processing.
Pharmacy is particularly well placed in this regard. Compared with many other industries, pharmacy is almost the gold standard for transparent and readily available benchmarking information. There are well-established KPIs across sales, margins, wages, stock and financial performance, giving pharmacy owners a meaningful basis to understand how their business is performing and where attention may be required.
The real value, however, comes from turning that information into something useful and timely. As part of our monthly BAS preparation, we provide our pharmacy clients with monthly KPI reporting, helping them understand what is happening in their business while the information is still current — rather than waiting until year-end for their accountant to tell them what happened months ago.
Modern cloud accounting and reporting systems allow us to combine financial information with the operational drivers of the pharmacy. This helps identify trends, areas of opportunity and emerging pressure points, and creates a regular conversation around what the numbers are telling us and what action, if any, should follow.
Ultimately, good reporting should allow the pharmacy owner to spend less time producing and interpreting financial information, while having greater confidence that someone is keeping a close eye on the numbers.
