Hospital inventory software, free: the honest boundary

The key facts

• The boundary first: patient records, dispensing and clinical workflows are hospital-system territory — BSimple does not claim them.
• What stock work exists around a hospital: supply rooms, clinics, labs, maintenance and consumables — traced, expiry-aware, audited.
• What free covers: a spreadsheet with expiry columns, while one person owns it; free tiers add counts with caps.
• BSimple runs the traced stock layer: batches, expiry, two-way traceability, purchasing, invoicing — from $180/month (AUD), free to trial.
• The full picture: how the inventory record works is the hub page for everything above.

The boundary, stated plainly

Hospitals and clinical facilities run dedicated systems for the things that touch patients: prescribing, dispensing, patient records, clinical governance. Those systems are regulated for good reason, and no inventory product — BSimple included — should pretend to do their job. If the requirement is clinical, the answer is the clinical system.

What remains is the stock layer around the clinical one, and it is substantial: consumables and supplies in store rooms, clinic and lab stock with expiry dates, maintenance materials, and the purchasing that keeps all of it flowing. This layer fails on spreadsheets in familiar ways — expiry surprises, untrustworthy quantities between counts, and no way to trace a batch forward once a question is asked.

What the traced stock layer needs

• Batch and expiry on every receipt — lot numbers and use-by dates recorded as goods arrive, expiry order visible at a glance.
• Two-way traceability — from a suspect lot forward to every destination it reached, and back from any item to its source.
• Counts that do not close the store — rolling counts per room from a phone browser, variances adjusted with an audit trail.
• Purchasing from the record — reorder levels that raise supplier orders, price variance caught before payment.
• The accounting handoff — approved invoices to Xero or MYOB; GST and filing stay with the accountant's system.

Free covers the first line only. The traced layer is the paid product nearly everywhere — the pharmacy page covers the same pattern for medication-adjacent stock.

Where BSimple fits

We build BSimple, so weigh that. For supply rooms, labs and the businesses that supply healthcare facilities — not the clinical workflow — BSimple runs the traced stock record: batches with expiry, traceability search in both directions, reorder-driven purchasing, counts from any browser, and invoicing with the Xero/MYOB handoff on one record, from $180/month (AUD). The hospital-context guide covers the fit in depth, and the medical-industries view covers the supplier side.

The honest test: trial one store room — receive with lots and expiry, run a trace, take a count. If the chain reads clean on your own stock, the layer fits; where the requirement is clinical, use the clinical system and skip us entirely.