A demo is the worst place to evaluate revenue analytics. Every product in this category looks identical for twenty minutes: a dashboard, a red number, a story about money you did not know you were losing. The differences sit underneath, in where the data comes from, what the arithmetic actually does, and what happens on the days the connection breaks.
Ten questions get at that. They are ordered so a vendor who cannot answer the first three rarely survives to the fourth. Bring your accountant. If you are in a PSAO, bring whoever reads your reconciliation reports.
1. Where does the data come from, exactly?
Three common answers, and they are not equivalent.
A read only database connection or a nightly export. You hear about a bad fill the next morning at the earliest, and usually at month end. Fine for reporting. Useless for intervention.
Screen scraping or a workstation agent. Something runs on a machine in your pharmacy and reads the screen or the local database. It breaks on every version upgrade of your dispensing system, and it puts software you did not write inside your network.
A published event API. Your pharmacy management system emits events as adjudication happens and the vendor subscribes. Nothing installed, nothing scraped, and the vendor consumes an interface the PMS vendor commits to supporting.
Ask which one. Then ask the follow up that matters more: what happens when the connection breaks for six hours? The right answer involves redelivery, idempotency keys and a backfill. The wrong answer is a shrug and “you would see a gap in the dashboard”.
2. What is your cost basis, and what happens when you do not have one?
This question decides whether the numbers are real.
Margin is revenue minus acquisition cost. Revenue is easy, because it sits on the adjudication response. Cost is hard, because the vendor does not automatically know what you paid your wholesaler for that NDC in that package size.
Four honest sources, in descending quality.
| Basis | What it is | How much to trust it |
|---|---|---|
| Your invoice for that exact NDC | Fact | High |
| Your invoice for another package size, scaled | Arithmetic on fact | Medium |
| NADAC | A CMS national survey average | Indicative only |
| A human override | Deliberate and attributable | High |
NADAC deserves particular scrutiny. It is a national average of what pharmacies report paying, and it is not what you paid. If a vendor computes your margin from NADAC without saying so on the screen, every number you see is a benchmark wearing the costume of a fact.
Now the sharper version. What does the product display when it has no cost at all? If the answer is zero, walk away. A fill with unknown cost shown as zero cost reports as pure profit, which is wrong in the most expensive direction. It hides losses instead of raising false alarms.
3. Which of these products can you show me running?
Every platform in this space markets a suite. Ask to see each module you are paying for demonstrated on live data, during the evaluation, before you sign. A screenshot deck and a working demonstration are different species.
The value of a purchase is what it does in month one. The only reliable evidence of that is watching it do it.
4. Is this one system, or eight tools sharing a logo?
Ask it explicitly, because the answer sets the price of your second and third purchase.
If each capability owns its own connection to your pharmacy system, turning on the next one means another integration, another credential, another vendor conversation and another set of numbers that will not tie out against the first. If everything runs on one event stream connected once, the second capability is a switch.
Ask how many times the vendor has to touch your dispensing system to sell you everything they sell.
5. What is your arithmetic?
An unglamorous question that catches real defects. Margin is a subtraction of two nearly equal numbers, which is exactly where binary floating point is proportionally worst. A product storing money as a decimal float will eventually, and invisibly, tell you a fill made three cents when it lost one.
Ask whether money is held as integer minor units end to end. Ask how a package cost is scaled to a dispensed quantity, and where the rounding happens. Rounding on every line accumulates error across a month. Rounding once at the end does not.
6. Who else can read my data, and how would I know?
Two sub questions.
Tenant isolation. In a multi tenant system, what stops one pharmacy’s data appearing in another’s report? “Our application always adds a tenant filter to the query” is a promise about developer discipline. Isolation enforced by the database itself is a property of the system. Ask which one it is, and ask whether an automated check stops a new table shipping without a policy.
Staff access. Someone at the vendor will be able to read your data, because support requires it. Normal. What is not normal is being unable to enumerate who did, when and why. Ask for the access log, ask whether it is append only, and ask whether you can see your own.
7. What happens when I leave?
Ask for the export format and the deletion timeline before you sign, not after you are unhappy. A vendor who will hand you a structured export of your own normalized events has nothing holding you except the product working. That is the vendor you want.
8. What makes the bill go up?
Per store pricing changes when you open a store. Per claim or percentage of recovery pricing changes every month, and it changes most in the months the product works best. Neither is dishonest. Only one is predictable. Ask for a written example of a bill in a very good month and show it to whoever does your books.
9. What does the product expect a human to do?
Analytics that produce a report produce a report. The pharmacies that get value have someone whose job includes working a queue. Ask what the daily workflow looks like, roughly how many items a day it generates, and who at your pharmacy owns it. If the honest answer is “your pharmacist, between patients”, price that time into the decision.
10. What are your limits?
The most useful question and the hardest to fake. A vendor who can name three things their product does badly is a vendor who has looked. A vendor who says the product handles everything has either never deployed it or is not telling you about the deployments.
Our answers
Data source. Real time events from PioneerRx’s Rx Event API, on a credential issued per store. No workstation agent and no scraping. Other pharmacy systems onboard through our integration program, scoped and timelined in the first conversation.
Archive. Every payload is stored exactly as received before anything interprets it. A parsing mistake on our side is recoverable by replaying the archive rather than a permanent hole in your history.
Cost basis. Wholesaler invoice or NADAC, with the basis displayed on every fill alongside a confidence level. Where we have no cost, we show no margin. Not zero.
Platform shape. One event spine, eight products on top of it: Margin, Billing, Audit, Authorizations, Inventory, Compliance, Intelligence and Integrations. Integrations is the spine itself, which is what makes every product an activation rather than an implementation. Ask us to demonstrate whichever ones your decision depends on, on your own claims.
Isolation and access. Database level tenant isolation, mandatory two factor authentication, and an append only log of PHI access.
Price. $199 per store per month for Margin, $349 with Audit, $649 for Platform. No percentage of your scripts, ever, and no per user fees. The full table is on pricing.
Every question above is one we answer in the evaluation, on a live system, with your own claims on screen. Hold every vendor on your shortlist to that standard and let the demonstrations decide. Book a demo when you want ours.