What CHIFA_OFFICINE does not do (and why you need something else)

Updated 2026-08-18 · Reviewed by Comité médical Doctavie

CHIFA_OFFICINE is a CNAS billing tool, not management software. Its seven declared functions, and everything absent from them.

CHIFA_OFFICINE is supplied by CNAS to conventioned pharmacies, is installed in more than twelve thousand of them, and does very well what it was written to do. The misunderstanding starts when it is taken for pharmacy management software: it is not one, and it does not claim to be.

Its seven functions, as CNAS declares them

  • Read the CHIFA card
  • Key in the medicines
  • Update the CHIFA card
  • Sign invoices with the Token
  • Extract electronic invoice bordereaux
  • Download new versions of the software
  • Download the blacklist of terminated cards

Seven functions, all pointed at a single object: the third-party-payer invoice and its deposit. It is a billing chain, complete and coherent.

What is absent from them

  • No stock, and therefore no batches and no expiry dates
  • No till: no session, no opening float, no counting variance
  • No purchasing: no supplier, no supplier invoice, no purchase price
  • No customer tabs
  • No accounting
  • No structured rejection tracking beyond consultation

In other words: everything that decides whether your pharmacy makes money. CNAS billing says what you are owed; it says nothing about what you paid, what is sleeping on the shelf, or what is missing from the drawer.

Double entry, and what it costs

Because the two tools are unaware of each other, the same prescription is typed twice: once into CHIFA_OFFICINE for the invoice, once into the management software for stock. That is not only lost time — it is two truths that drift apart. On the day they stop agreeing, neither of them lets you work out which one is wrong.

How management software can connect to it

CHIFA_OFFICINE itself maintains a file intended for third-party software, and its user guide says so explicitly: a database holding the bordereaux, the invoices, their detail and the medicines. Management software can therefore READ it — never write to it — to reconcile what CHIFA billed against what you actually sold, and destock on that basis.

That connection enables the one check nobody performs by hand: the bordereau counter. If the amount CHIFA billed and the amount deposited diverge, the difference never comes back and appears on no rejection list, because it was never claimed.

What to ask a vendor

  • Do you read CHIFA_OFFICINE’s database, or do I key everything twice?
  • Do you write to it? (the right answer is no — it is CNAS’s database)
  • Do you detect a gap between what CHIFA billed and the deposited bordereau?
  • What do you do when CNAS updates CHIFA_OFFICINE?

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FAQ

Can I do without CHIFA_OFFICINE?

No. Signing invoices with the Token and extracting the bordereaux go through it, and the convention is between CNAS and the pharmacy. Management software sits beside it, not instead of it.

Can a vendor write into CHIFA_OFFICINE’s database?

It is CNAS’s database and third-party software has no business writing to it. A vendor advertising that as a feature is describing a risk, not an advantage: the next CNAS update decides what happens afterwards.

Is there a CNAS approval scheme for management software?

No public register of approved software could be found, and no Algerian vendor displays an approval number — only the words “CHIFA compatible”. The convention binds CNAS to the pharmacy, not to the vendor.