One sector, properly understood
Most accountants can produce a set of pharmacy accounts. Far fewer can tell you why your margin moved when your item count did not, or why a category change in the Drug Tariff cost you money in a month you dispensed more than usual. That gap is the reason this practice exists.
We are a trading style of Buzz Accounting Ltd, a UK accountancy practice. The pharmacy work is done by people who follow the CPCF settlements, the monthly Drug Tariff and the advanced service specifications as a matter of routine, because a pharmacy's accounts are largely a consequence of those documents.
What we do
Accounts and tax, dispensing bookkeeping, NHS income reconciliation, VAT, payroll, and the modelling around buying or selling. The common thread is that we treat NHS income as something to be checked rather than accepted — it arrives as a settlement statement, not an invoice you raised, and nobody else is going to audit it for you.
What we will not do
- We do not give clinical or regulatory advice. GPhC standards, responsible pharmacist arrangements and controlled drugs governance are matters for you, your superintendent and your professional body. We will tell you what a decision costs; we will not tell you whether it is professionally appropriate.
- We do not sell a funding forecast as a certainty. The 2026/27 settlement is agreed. What follows it is not, and anyone modelling your next five years as though it were is selling confidence rather than analysis.
- We do not publish prices we have not thought about. Fixed monthly fees, quoted after a free review and agreed before anything starts.
How we work
Remote-first, across the United Kingdom. There is no branch to visit because the work happens in your records, your Drug Tariff and your NHSBSA statements. Jurisdiction is stated up front where it differs: establishment payments were abolished in England but remain in Wales, and that alone changes what a Welsh contractor's accounts should show.
What we look at first, and why
The reimbursement gap. Because it is money you are losing every month with nothing in your records to tell you so. The Deduction Scale reduces reimbursement on the assumption that you buy below Drug Tariff price — 20% on generics in Category A and M, 9.85% on appliances, 5% on brands, flat since January 2024. The assumption is applied whether or not your buying terms achieve it, and it is netted off before the money reaches you, so there is no line anywhere that says what it cost. It has to be reconstructed.
The working capital tied up in the cycle. Nine to thirty-eight days to an estimated advance, sixty-three to ninety-two to final settlement, against wholesaler terms that are usually thirty. The gap is real money at your facility rate, and it is the number that decides whether a busy month helps or hurts.
Whether the submission cycle is actually being reconciled. Not whether the money arrived, but whether it matched — because negative reconciliation is recovered from the next advance rather than invoiced, and an unexplained movement is easy to absorb and hard to recover once a few months have passed.
Two things we will tell you that most advisers will not
The old sliding-scale deduction is still printed in the Drug Tariff, and it is historic. Part V Table 3 still shows 5.63% to 11.50% banded by monthly total, labelled as applying up to September 2022 and during the transition to January 2024. If a spreadsheet in your pharmacy uses a banded rate, it has been wrong for more than two years. The live position is three flat rates.
A retrospective top-up you were owed can be lost by ceasing to trade. Concessionary prices carry a quarterly retrospective top-up paid three quarters later — April to June dispensing topped up the following January, and so on. But where the pharmacy ceased trading before the determination is made, NHSBSA will not pay it, even though you were trading in the month it relates to. That has applied since April 2024, and it belongs in a sale valuation rather than in a write-off afterwards.
What we will not do
- We do not give clinical or GPhC regulatory advice. Registration, superintendent and responsible pharmacist arrangements, supervision and professional standards are for you and your regulator.
- We do not process patient data. We work from your financial records, FP34 schedules and NHSBSA statements. Patient identifiable information should never be sent to us.
- We do not tell you that a running balance in the controlled drugs register is a legal requirement. It is strongly recommended good practice; the legal requirements concern what the register records and how it is kept. Precision matters when the alternative is a client acting on a rule that does not exist.
