Cannabis retail stores in Ontario, Canada’s largest cannabis consumer market, have never been more concerned with improving their bottom line and enhancing operational efficiency. In addition to complying with AGCO regulations, Ontario now faces the challenge of market saturation and fierce competition. Thus, leveraging tools that streamline inventory and operations while seamlessly automating compliance is essential to succeed in the cannabis retail industry. Via advanced AGCO reporting, a purchase order import tool, and an OCS catalogue subscription, Cova POS provides Ontario retailers with the best cannabis store tech solutions to save time and ensure compliance.
What is the Cova OCS Master Catalogue Subscription?
In Ontario, AGCO requires all private licensed cannabis retailers to obtain a supply purchase contract with OCS and only sell OCS-supplied cannabis products. OCS, the Ontario Cannabis Store, is the only legal wholesaler of cannabis products in Ontario. OCS Catalogue Subscription allows cannabis retailers to update their product library in Cova directly from the OCS database. This auto-populates tracking data like SKUs and comprehensive product information directly from the OCS and spares retailers hours of manually adding new products to their POS system, along with the risk of human error, ensuring compliant operations always. With OCS catalogue subscription:
- Any new products added by the OCS will automatically populate in Cova POS.
- Certain product updates to the OCS content will automatically reflect in your catalogue.
- No products in your Cova POS catalogue will be deleted or archived without your intervention.
- You can still add additional items if needed, which will not be impacted by the subscription process.
- Product information such as images and descriptions will be added to a cannabis product that already exists in your Cova catalogue.
How Does the OCS Master Catalogue Subscription Enhance Efficiency and Boost your Bottom Line?
Significant Savings in Labour Costs and Time
The OCS regularly releases new cannabis products. In May 2022, it introduced over 300 new products to the cannabis market. Thus, private cannabis retailers need to manually add new product information to their cannabis POS system, which reportedly takes a minimum of 5 to 6 hours of work and adds to your payroll costs. It’s also a process highly prone to human error and impacts compliance reporting. Cova POS, with the OCS catalogue subscription, seamlessly plugs in all new products, letting cannabis retail stores save enormous labour costs and time.
Accurate Compliance Reporting
All Ontario licensed cannabis retailers must submit a monthly report to AGCO that entails all relevant sales and inventory data for cannabis products purchased from the OCS. The cannabis products in this report are identified with their OCS SKU and UPC number, thus ensuring that all product information is accurately added to your POS database and is prudent for compliance reporting. Via OCS master catalogue subscription, all information associated with each cannabis product is automatically added from the OCS catalogue, leaving no error or gap in your AGCO compliance report.
Speed up Receiving Orders
Receiving cannabis products from OCS involves updating your POS and inventory and generating purchase orders with all the existing or new product details, including cost, order quantity, received quantity, price, and even the package number. Depending on your POS, this process could be very manual, error-prone and lengthy. Cova automates the entire process via its PO Import tool and OCS catalogue subscription.
What is the Purchase Order Import Tool?
The Purchase Order import tool automates the typical multi-step process of entering the received shipment information, including package numbers and confirming quantities to generate a purchase order. With the Cova PO import tool, once your import the ASN sheet provided by the AGCO, it automatically maps in all tracking information and generates a Purchase Order. You can then easily verify the content before finalizing the import. Automating the intake of information into your POS via the PO import tool not only saves you time and labour resources but also streamlines your compliance report to the AGCO.
How Does the OCS Master Catalogue Subscription Speed up Receiving?
The PO import tool alone maps all the information from the ASN into your POS system, but only for products with existing OCS SKUs in your catalogue. Therefore products without OCS SKUs need to be added to your Cova catalogue first to prevent any import errors. The Cova OCS master catalogue subscription ensures that your catalogue is up to date every week. During the update, if an item doesn't exist in your catalogue, it will be automatically added as a new item with all the product information. So when receiving your ASN from the OCS, rest easy that all products, including new ones, already exist, and receiving will become lightning fast.
Stay Competitive by Offering New Cannabis Products
Ontario's cannabis market is reaching a saturation point, leaving private cannabis retailers facing tough competition. On top of that, the only cannabis wholesaler in Ontario, the OCS, has a massive online store for consumers, making it the sole supplier and a major competitor at the same time. One of the differentiation strategies to stay ahead of the competition is to keep offering new cannabis products to your customers.
Keeping your catalogue current with the latest products is highly prudent. Despite that, many dispensaries turn away from new products and trends due to inventory processing hurdles. As discussed above, ordering new products costs time and money spent updating your catalogue. The Cova OCS master catalogue subscription takes this burden off your shoulders and lets you easily keep current with the OCS's new products.
