A demo is the worst place to evaluate revenue analytics. Every product in this category looks the same for twenty minutes: a dashboard, a red number, a story about money you did not know you were losing. The differences are underneath, in where the data comes from, what the arithmetic actually does, and what happens on the days the connection breaks.
These are the ten questions worth asking. They are ordered so that a vendor who cannot answer the first three rarely survives to the fourth. Bring your accountant, and if you are in a PSAO, bring whoever reads your reconciliation reports.
1. Where does the data come from, exactly?
There are three common answers, and they are not equivalent.
A read-only database connection or a nightly export. You find out about a bad fill the next morning at the earliest, and usually at month end. That is fine for reporting and 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. This 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 is installed, nothing scrapes, and the vendor is a consumer of 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 do you do when you do not have one?
This is the question that decides whether the numbers are real.
Margin is revenue minus acquisition cost. Revenue is easy, because it is 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.
There are 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. It is not what you paid. If a vendor computes your margin from NADAC and does not say so on the screen, every number you see is a benchmark wearing the costume of a fact.
Then 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 an unknown cost shown as zero cost reports as pure profit. That is not merely wrong. It is wrong in the most expensive direction, because 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, in the evaluation, before you sign. A screenshot deck and a demonstration are different species, and the difference is exactly the difference between software and a roadmap.
This is not cynicism. It is that the value of a purchase is what it does in month one, and the only reliable evidence of that is watching it do it.
4. Is this one system or eight separate tools with a shared logo?
Worth asking explicitly, because the answer changes what the second and third purchase cost you.
If each capability is its own product with its own connection to your pharmacy system, then 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 instead everything runs on one event stream that was 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 that stores 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 (cents) 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. Row-level security enforced by the database itself is a property of the system. Ask which one it is, and ask whether there is an automated check that a new table cannot ship without a policy.
Staff access. Someone at the vendor will be able to read your data, because support requires it. That is 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 kind of 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, but 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 is expected to own 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.
Attergo’s answers, as of today
In the spirit of the last question.
Data source. Real-time events from PioneerRx’s Rx Event API, using 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 rather than promised vaguely in the last.
Archive. Every payload is stored exactly as received before anything interprets it. A parsing mistake on our side is then 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 (clinical services billed as medical claims on the 837P, with remittance reconciled from the 835), Audit, Authorizations, Inventory, Compliance, Intelligence and Integrations. Integrations is the spine itself, and it 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, and hold us to the same standard this article sets for everyone else.
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, $499 for the complete platform. No percentage of your scripts, ever, and no per-user fees.
The standard we accept. Every question in this article is one we answer in the evaluation, on a live system, with your own claims on screen. Hold every vendor on your shortlist to exactly that, and let the demonstrations decide.