Exploratory Analysis of Daily Sales, Costs, And Profitability In a Community Pharmacy: A 14-Month Retrospective Study

This study explored daily financial activity in a community pharmacy located in Sabha, Libya, using transaction records collected from September 2022 to October 2023. Exploratory data analysis included descriptive statistics, distribution plots, boxplots, calendar heatmaps, monthly comparisons, chronological plots, and correlation analysis. The initial dataset contained 428 records, of which 396 were retained following preprocessing. Profits, total sales, and total average cost of sales were positively skewed and displayed substantial daily variation. Strong positive correlations were observed between sales and profits (r = 0.86), sales and average cost of sales (r = 0.99), and profits and average cost of sales (r = 0.83). Higher financial activity occurred more frequently toward the end of the working week, although the limited observation period did not permit firm conclusions regarding recurring annual seasonality. The analysis also identified an exceptionally high profit value that required verification against the original records. Overall, the findings demonstrate how exploratory analysis of pharmacy transaction data can support financial monitoring, data-quality improvement, inventory planning, and operational decision-making in community pharmacies.