Kaizen CFO/blog
Veterinary Bookkeeping

Bookkeeping for Veterinary Practices


You got into this to help animals, not to reconcile a practice-management system against a bank statement at 9pm. Fair enough — you keep the patients, we'll keep the ledgers. Nobody's books should require a bedside manner.

A veterinarian examining a dog in an exam room

Half your business is a pharmacy you forgot you run

A veterinary practice is a clinic bolted to a pharmacy bolted to a small retail store. Medications, vaccines, food, and flea-and-tick products are real inventory — a big chunk of your money sitting on shelves and in fridges — and if nobody's tracking what's bought versus used versus sold, your cost of goods is a guess and your margins are folklore.

Clean books treat the pharmacy like the business it is: real inventory, real COGS, real margin on products versus services. That alone usually surfaces money that was quietly leaking through the dispensary.

Production, collection, and the deposit should all agree

Your practice-management software — the PIMS — tracks what you produced. The bank tracks what you collected. Startlingly often, nobody makes those two tell the same story, and the gap between them is exactly where errors and missed revenue live.

We reconcile the PIMS to the accounting and the deposits every month, so production, collection, and cash finally agree. It's not glamorous, but neither is finding out at tax time that a year of numbers never tied out.

How Kaizen runs it

We reconcile your PIMS to the books and the bank, track pharmacy and retail inventory so COGS is real, split product margin from service margin, and run a documented monthly close that lands the same way every period. Payroll, vendor bills, and DVM production all get handled cleanly.

One more reason this matters right now: consolidators are buying veterinary practices at a genuinely enthusiastic pace, and clean books are worth real money at the table. Even if you never sell, knowing your actual numbers beats hoping. If your books are already tidy and you just need someone to file, we're overkill — hire a bookkeeper and keep the difference.

What's included

  • PIMS reconciled to the accounting and to the bank deposits, monthly
  • Pharmacy, vaccine, food, and retail inventory tracked with real COGS
  • Product margin separated from service margin
  • DVM production tracked and reconciled
  • Payroll and vendor bills coded correctly
  • Bank and credit-card reconciliations every month
  • A documented, same-date month-end close
  • 1099 tracking and a monthly data-quality scan
Most practices start with the 1-2-3 CFO™ Reset — Month 1 reconcile the PIMS and clean up, Month 2 fix inventory and product margin, Month 3 systems and reporting.

Pricing

$1,000–3,000/motypically ~1% of monthly revenue · month-to-month, no contract
~$6,400/mowhat a $60K in-house bookkeeper costs fully loaded, before they take a day off
A guessed marginwhat an untracked dispensary buys: product COGS you can't trust and shelves that shrink quietly
A team + a systemwhat Kaizen buys: PIMS reconciled, inventory real, and a close that ties to the bank

Straight answers

Do you reconcile to our PIMS (Cornerstone, Avimark, etc.)?

Yes — tying the PIMS to the accounting and the deposits is the heart of veterinary bookkeeping. Production, collection, and cash all agreeing is where a surprising amount of missing money turns up.

Can you handle pharmacy and inventory tracking?

We track medications, vaccines, food, and retail as real inventory with real COGS, and split product margin from service margin — so the dispensary stops being a financial black box.

We might sell to a consolidator. Does this help?

Considerably. Buyers pay more for clean, reconciled books with credible margins, and diligence goes faster. Prep a year or so ahead and it reads as good hygiene rather than a scramble.

We're a small single-doctor clinic. Do we need this?

Maybe not yet. A small practice with simple inventory and a good bookkeeper can be fine. The value kicks in as the pharmacy grows or you add doctors and locations to compare.

Free 20-minute books assessment

We'll show you the five things we'd fix first in your books — useful whether you hire us, hire someone, or do neither.

Talk to Sales

Or call us directly: +1 786 789 0969