With all the regulations and constantly-changing laws that cannabis retail owners have to keep up with—and the magnitude of the potential consequences for being found out of compliance—it makes sense to streamline and automate as many aspects of your dispensary operations as possible.
Take inventory management for example. If a retail business in a traditional industry suffers an inventory loss due to damage, theft, or poor counts, they certainly stand to lose profit. But if a cannabis retail shop loses inventory, it can lead to much more than loss on the bottom line—it can potentially lead to the loss of your license.
Cannabis retailers face another unique inventory challenge in state-mandated seed-to-sale reporting requirements. If physical inventory counts in your store don’t match up with counts reported to the state, you could quickly find yourself out of compliance.
Inventory Management Options
There are plenty of retail inventory management solutions out there. The problem with many of them, though, is that they don’t account for the unique challenges and reporting needs of cannabis retailers.
Not only are you often selling multi-gram units across multiple batches, but you also have to ensure that all inventory updates are properly reported to your state’s system—whether Metrc, Leaf Data Systems, BioTrackTHC, or another platform.
Of course, you could try to keep inventory the old-fashioned way. But there are two major liabilities with manual inventory tracking:
- It significantly increases workload and puts unnecessary strain on your resources.
- It significantly increases your risk of erroneous data entry which can lead to compliance issues.
Tracking inventory by hand also means you’ll have to enter data into the state's reporting system manually. This puts additional load on your workforce and again increases your risk for human error and finding yourself out of compliance.
Cannabis-Specific Inventory Management Solutions
Luckily, inventory management solutions are available that are tailored to the unique needs of cannabis retailers. Point of sale software that includes intuitive inventory tracking and robust reporting can help you keep up with every gram of product that enters and exits your store.
Before investing in cannabis dispensary POS software, you’ll want to ensure that it offers integration with your state’s seed-to-sale tracking system. This will not only free up you and your employees’ time from manually reporting daily inventory updates, but it will also greatly reduce your risk of mistakenly entering incorrect data to the state—which can land you in hot water and potentially put you at risk for losing your license to operate.
To learn more about how cannabis-specific POS software can streamline your operations and enhance your business’ efficiency, contact us to book a demo or just chat about your unique needs.
