One hand count came up 1,500 units short. Nobody could say where it went.
Stcki did not start as a product. It started because my wife's practice in Austin, where I'm COO, couldn't answer a basic question about its own money. So I built the answer as its own company, for every practice asking the same question.
The worst part wasn't the number. It was that we thought we were good at this.
Saving Face is a real aesthetics practice in Austin. Multiple locations, real volume, a team that cares. We had software. We had a spreadsheet. We ordered on time, we watched our margins, we negotiated hard with our reps every year and felt good walking out of those meetings.
Then we counted by hand. The shelf and the system disagreed by about 1,500 units. Not a rounding error — a real number, in a category where a unit is real money. And when we went looking for the answer, there wasn't one. No single person had done anything wrong. The information just didn't exist anywhere.
We thought we knew our cost. We thought we were negotiating on the best dollars available to us. We thought we had operational efficiency — and in most ways, we did. We were still wrong.
Samples came in and never got recorded, so product moved through the practice that the books never saw. Rebates and credits were earned and never chased. The price we thought we paid was the invoice price, not what the product actually cost us after everything that came back. You cannot negotiate a number you don't have.
So I stopped trying to fix it with discipline and started building the thing that would just tell us. That became Stcki: its own company, built for every practice with the same blind spots. Saving Face became its first customer.
Four blindspots, in a practice that looked well run.
Product we never booked
Samples, bonus vials and promotional product arrived, went on the shelf and got used. None of it existed on paper, so every count after that was wrong by an amount nobody could name.
A cost that wasn't our cost
We were running the business off invoice price. Rebates, credits, promotions and returns all landed later, in a different place, against a different month. The real per-unit number was never in front of anyone.
Money we earned and never collected
Credits posted and sat there. Rebate programs we qualified for went unclaimed because claiming them required someone to remember, on a deadline, while running a practice.
A business living in people's heads
Ordering happened because someone remembered. Protocols were whatever the last person wrote down. It worked until that person was out — or we opened another location.
Counting was never the point. Answering was.
The first version of Stcki tracked product, because product is where the money leaks first and hardest. It worked. Saving Face stopped losing units.
But every fix taught the same lesson: the problem was never a lack of data. It was that nobody had time to read it, connect it to the other data, notice the thing worth noticing, and then go do something about it. Tracking tells you what happened. It doesn't do the work.
So we kept building past inventory. Invoices got read automatically. Rebates got watched and claimed. Samples got captured at intake. Protocols got structured so the answer was the same no matter who was asked. At some point it stopped being an app with reports and became a system that runs parts of the business — which is what VERA is, and why we describe Stcki as a practice manager rather than software.
Saving Face is still Stcki's first customer and its proving ground. Every automation is tested there before it goes to another practice, and it ships only when it works.
Three things we hold to.
It runs alongside what you have
No migration, no ripping out your EMR or practice management system. Stcki sits next to them and reads what it needs.
Nothing goes out without approval
VERA drafts the claim, the order, the message. A person says yes before anything leaves the building.
Your numbers stay yours
Used to run your practice, not to build a data product. We don't sell what we hold, and we don't pool it into a benchmark.
Pick the one that matches where you are.
You want us to build your system
Custom builds. Scoped and priced per build, available on Stcki Practice Manager. Start with the one workflow that keeps getting stuck.
You'd rather just see it
A real walkthrough on real data. Or ask a question and we'll answer it straight.
You want to see it work somewhere else first
What changed in a practice that ran this for eight months — the numbers, not the testimonial.