The Daily Routine
Post the sales journal directly from point-of-sale data with discounts, refunds and voided transactions broken out separately rather than netted together. Count and log cash at every point where custody transfers hands, with two signatures on the count sheet. Reconcile that day's deposit against the sales record and write down the reason for any over or short balance.
Receive inventory on the day it physically arrives, matching the BioTrack transfer manifest, the vendor invoice, and a physical count before anything reaches the sales floor or the vault.
The Weekly Routine
Reconcile the bank feed, review accounts payable aging against the cash forecast before scheduling payments, review accounts receivable aging for wholesale accounts and escalate anything past due, and run cycle counts on that week's assigned product group.
A weekly cadence keeps errors visible while they're still cheap to fix, instead of surfacing them during a frantic month-end scramble.
- Bank reconciliation and updated cash position
- AP aging review with a payment schedule tied to the cash forecast
- AR aging review with active collections follow-up
- Scheduled cycle counts with documented variances
The Month-End Checklist
Complete the inventory rollforward and tie it to both physical counts and BioTrack quantities. Book accruals and prepaid amortization. Reconcile payroll to filed employment tax returns. Eliminate intercompany balances across affiliated entities. Review the trial balance line by line against the prior period.
Close the month with a written variance narrative. If a balance moved materially and no one can explain why in writing, the close isn't actually finished.
Documentation That Holds Up
Every journal entry should have retrievable support behind it — an invoice, a BioTrack manifest, a count sheet, a payroll register, or a signed explanatory memo. File it so it can be pulled by period and by vendor years later, not just this quarter.
The real test: could a new bookkeeper, or an RLD or IRS examiner, reconstruct the reasoning behind an entry from the file alone, without asking anyone?
Errors That Keep Recurring
The repeat offenders in New Mexico cannabis bookkeeping are coding inventoriable costs directly to expense accounts, recording customer deposits as revenue instead of tying revenue to the sales journal, netting discounts against gross sales, ignoring waste and employee samples, and letting collected excise tax and GRT sit inside a revenue account instead of a liability account.
Each of these distorts both the tax return and the operating picture, and each is entirely preventable with a documented process the whole team actually follows.
