For practice owners and managers who know their procurement could be smarter, but are still ordering the way they always have.
It is Tuesday morning. The first patient is due any minute. Better get the order in.
You open the first supplier website. Then the second. Then a third, because one product was cheaper somewhere else — or was that last week? You order what is on the list, from whoever you always order from. Whether that is the best price, you are not entirely sure. There is no time to check right now.
Next week, you do the same thing.
The sentence that hides a cost
Some sentences sound like routine but are actually decisions. “We always order it this way” is one of them. Nobody has ever sat down and worked out what it costs.
The time nobody counts
When everything you need is in stock, ordering is quick. But that is rarely how it goes.
The moment one product is unavailable, the real work begins. You open another website, or search on Google. If you cannot recall the alternative off the top of your head, you search by active ingredient — on a third website, sometimes a fourth. Practices we spoke with deal with this several times in a single week.
On average, veterinary practices spend three to six hours a week on procurement and inventory management. That sounds manageable. Add it up over a year and it is no longer hours. It is working weeks. Work that never appears on an invoice.
The costs nobody sees either
After staff, procurement is your largest cost. On average, it accounts for 20 to 30 percent of revenue. For a practice turning over €500,000, that is already €150,000 a year.
And yet the structure of the current system makes it almost impossible to actively steer on it.
Prices vary across suppliers. Discounts come through promotions or sales reps. Cheaper alternatives require someone to know they exist. The information is out there, but it is scattered across websites, inboxes, and people’s memories.
And then there are shipping costs. Many practices stick with the same supplier — even when another is cheaper — simply because they already have something to order there. Placing three products elsewhere and paying separate shipping on top feels like a step backwards. So the order stays where it always was.
It feels like the sensible thing to do. Until you do the maths.
A 5 percent difference on your procurement spend is €7,500 a year. Not a saving you are capturing. A loss you are not seeing. Every year.
Why the system makes this hard to change
One practice we spoke with tried to connect their ordering process to their practice management system. Too many errors, too much time spent correcting them afterwards. So they went back to manual, via the familiar websites. Simply because it works. More or less.
The tools most practices use were built to help you place orders, not to help you buy better. And in most vet clinics, that ordering process has simply grown over time across phone calls, emails, webshops and supplier portals. When the system just about works, there is rarely a moment that invites you to stop and ask what it is actually costing.
Until someone sees it all together for the first time.
Lost time and lost margin look like two separate problems.
They have the same root cause: A lack of visibility. And it is also what makes procurement optimisation so difficult in practice.
What do you order most? Where does most of your spend go? Where are prices diverging? Which supplier handles the bulk of your orders, and what does that mean for your next contract conversation?
Most practices cannot answer those questions. Simply because the answers are not visible anywhere.
What changes when you see it all together for the first time
You keep ordering from your existing suppliers. But suddenly you can see what is actually happening: where prices differ, where alternatives are cheaper, where margin is slipping away. And only then does a real choice become possible.
Curious what your procurement actually looks like when you see it in one place?
VetProcure is free for veterinary clinics. Connect your existing supplier accounts and see for yourself what becomes visible. No IT setup required, no commitment.
Register for free or book a short demo if you want to see how it works first.