Recent years have seen massive expansion within the marijuana industry and many practitioners are reporting similar growth within their own operations. Cannabis is one of the fastest-growing marketplaces in the United States and given the high number of competitors entering the industry every day, cannabis operators need smart, focused, and conscientious business processes to stay ahead of the curve.
Most cannabis companies will turn to technology to fill business process gaps and if you haven’t already, you will. Cannabis inventory can be stressful, cannabis accounting is tricky, and there really isn’t a manual approach to cannabis compliance.
Too Many Questions
As you begin to consider your business requirements and the technologies available to deliver against them, you may find yourself swimming in even more questions. Will you use a single solution or combination of solutions? Are there features included within broad-use, off-the-shelf technologies that can solve your cannabis-specific problems?
Cannabis accounting is complex and as a cannabis operator, you must fully grasp your specific federal and state cannabis accounting guidelines as well as manage all the operational complexities created as a result. Once you master cost, accrual, and absorption accounting, check out the 471 and 280E tax rules.
GAAP/accrual accounting is required for absorption/cost accounting to comply with 280e/471. Tax section 280E, for example, is the federal statute that prevents a cannabusiness from taking tax deductions or credits against the Schedule I controlled substance.
You Need Real Answers
Cannabis enterprise resource planning (ERP) is the single, purpose-built software solution that will put you in front of the growth of your industry. Enterprise resource planning brings all operational data under a single pipeline, which gives leadership the ready ability to search and cross-reference all aspects of an organization’s business practices.
The cannabis industry is particularly singular in its specific ERP needs because of the complications that surround regulatory guidelines. A cannabis ERP solution helps you not only maintain a good view of your business processes but also the moving target of regulatory compliance.
Different jurisdictional agencies have varying expectations for compliance and to make matters worse, state and federal regulations shift quickly in response to politics, consumer concerns and a number of other variables.
Some of the most obvious ways cannabis ERP helps you stay on top of compliance matters is tracking the flow of inventory and monies through your cannabusiness. State and federal regulations require that cannabis companies meticulously track all inventory from seed to sale.
You Need to Track Everything
Beyond the inventory itself, you’ll need to track each individual employee who works with cannabis plants. Seed-to-sale ERP allows you to restrict access to sensitive information, often through tiered roles, granting access only to those with proper authorization and then monitor each process and transaction, by each user.
What about all that cannabis data? Cannabis ERP manages the tremendous volume of information your operation generates. Whether it’s sales data, customer service info, inventory tracking – cannabis ERP compiles and makes the data available to any authorized user to deliver valuable business insights.
Managing your sensitive data with a unified system helps you to uncover issues more quickly and efficiently in the event a data breach occurs. There are certain protocols cannabis companies are required to take to alert authorities, customers, and patients when applicable. Cannabis ERP offers the visibility, tracking and reporting to help you resolve data breach issues and prevent them from resurfacing.
Some cannabis operators opt for a number of cobbled-together solutions to meet a base-level need. Other operators choose out-of-the-box software which lacks feature functionality specifically designed for cannabis.
You Need Cannabis ERP
As your cannabusiness begins to grow, disparate technology solutions will affect your ability to control the integrity of your cannabis company’s data for reporting and compliance purposes. This brings new challenges that impact your ability to scale or even stay afloat.
Cannabis enterprise resource planning (ERP) software delivers a single source of accurate and up-to-date business data to cannabis companies. By integrating a purpose-built system that supports your specific cannabis industry needs, you get real business data and intelligence tools to reveal noncompliance issues, manage complex cannabis accounting and more easily spot trends.
