Get alerted before stock expires

If you track batches or lots for your clinic's stock (vaccines, reagents, medications — anything with an expiry date), you can set up an automation rule that alerts someone automatically as a batch approaches its expiry date, instead of relying on staff to notice it on a shelf check.

This needs both the Products & Services module (for stock tracking) and the Automations module active. Enable them under Administration → Modules if you don't see Automations in the sidebar — see Modules.

How it works

Every night, MediSync checks every batch of stock across your branches for its expiry date. Any automation rule you've built for Material expiring fires for each batch that expires within the rule's Alert within (days) window (and passes any conditions you added) — so the alert always reflects the batch's up-to-date days until expiry, not a value that was true when you first received the stock.

Create the rule

1. Go to Automations in the sidebar and click New rule.
2. Under Trigger, choose Material expiring.
3. Set Alert within (days) to the number of days' warning you want. A new rule starts at 30 (a month's notice). This is the "how soon is soon enough to tell me" setting — if you clear the box, you'll hear about every tracked batch expiring within a year, which is rarely what you want. You can still add conditions, for example Quantity greater than 0.
4. Add an action for what should happen when the condition matches — most clinics start with Notify the owner, which puts an alert in the owner's in-app notifications. You can also add Send an email, Send an SMS, or Send a WhatsApp message (SMS and WhatsApp each need their own module active) to reach someone faster. For these, write the text in Message and use Insert field to add the product Name, Lot number and Expiry date. Set Send to to Owner, because a stock alert has no client to send to. See WhatsApp messages from automation rules if you want WhatsApp alerts to come from your own number.
5. Name the rule (e.g. "Expiring stock — 30 day warning") and save it. New rules save as enabled — toggle a rule off from the rules list any time without deleting it.

You can build more than one rule if different warning windows should go to different people — for example, a 60-day heads-up to the person who reorders stock, and a 7-day urgent alert to the clinic owner.

What you'll see

• A Notify the owner alert is titled with the rule's name and, unless you wrote your own message, reads like "Lidocaine 2%, lot A123, expires on 2026-08-01 (18 days left, quantity 4)". It doesn't name the branch.
• A batch that's already inside your warning window when you first create the rule is picked up on the very next nightly check — you don't need to wait for stock levels to change.
• You won't get the same alert twice in one day, even if a batch matches more than one of your rules' checks that night — but a batch that still matches the next day will alert again, so an expiring batch keeps surfacing until it's used up, discarded, or its stock record is updated.
• Check Automations → Runs to see every time a rule has fired, whether each message actually went out (a message step that couldn't be sent shows Failed with the reason), and to re-run one that failed.

Recording batches with expiry dates

Expiry alerts only work for stock you've recorded with a lot number and expiry date when receiving it — plain stock adjustments with no expiry date won't be picked up. See your Products & Services stock-receiving workflow for how to attach lot/expiry details when stock comes in.