Sources and formats
Whatever your stockists already use.
PharmeXa does not ask a stockist to change how they work. It reads the reports their existing system already produces — and where a format is genuinely new, it learns it once.
Stockist systems
The systems we read
Named where we have handled them repeatedly. The list is a description of experience, not a certification or a partnership.
Marg ERP
- Excel
- CSV
One of the most widely deployed systems among Indian pharma distributors. Its stock and sales register exports are read directly.
Medica ERP
- Excel
Stock statements exported per period, including opening and closing positions alongside purchase and sales movement.
EasySol
- Excel
- CSV
- TXT
Distributor stock reports, including the variants where product descriptions and pack sizes share a single column.
Prompt ERP
- Excel
- CSV
Monthly stock and sales statements, including multi-sheet workbooks that split movement across tabs.
Custom and local software
- Excel
- CSV
- TXT
The long tail — in-house tools, regional packages, and the stockist who maintains the whole thing in one spreadsheet. Handled through the same mapping path as everything else.
File formats
What each format costs you
All four are accepted. They are not equally reliable, and it is more useful to say so than to claim they are.
| Format | How it is handled | In practice |
|---|---|---|
| XLSX / XLS | Read directly, including multi-sheet workbooks and merged header rows. | The most reliable format — send this where you have the choice. |
| CSV | Read directly. Delimiter and encoding are detected rather than assumed. | Works well; column order does not need to be fixed. |
| TXT | Fixed-width and delimited layouts are both parsed. | Common from older local software. |
| Tabular text is extracted from the document. | Digitally generated PDFs extract cleanly. A photographed or scanned page is not reliable — ask the stockist for the Excel export instead. |
The long tail
What happens with a format we have never seen
Most of the difficulty in this problem is not the five named systems — it is the stockist running a regional package nobody has heard of, or maintaining the whole thing in a single spreadsheet with the totals typed in by hand.
Those go down the same path. PharmeXa reads the file, works out which columns carry which stock fields, and asks the MR to confirm the product names it does not recognise. That confirmation is remembered, so the second month from that stockist behaves like any other.
The practical limit is legibility, not format. A digitally generated file of any kind is fine. A photograph of a printed page is not, and we will tell you that rather than return a number we do not trust.
See persistent product mapping for how a confirmed name is reused.
PharmeXa does not replace your primary ERP.
Your primary sales, billing, dispatch and accounting stay exactly where they are. PharmeXa is concerned with what happens after the invoice — the secondary movement from stockist to pharmacy, hospital, clinic and retail, which your primary ERP has no visibility of because it was never billed by you.
That boundary is deliberate. A platform that tried to be both would need to be installed at every stockist, and no stockist is going to change their ERP because one of their suppliers asked.