Revenue Recording and POS Discipline
Record gross sales, discounts, refunds and excise tax collected as separate line items rather than netting them into one figure. Netting hides exactly the leakage that determines whether a store is actually profitable, and it complicates every reconciliation that follows.
Tie the day's cash deposit to the sales journal daily, not to the bank statement at month end. That distinction matters the moment anyone asks whether all revenue was actually reported.
Receiving and Landed Cost
Because a dispensary's cost of goods sold is limited to the cost of acquiring product, landed unit cost accuracy is essentially the entire federal tax position for a retail license. Match every receipt to a vendor invoice and a BioTrack manifest, and record unit cost at the moment of receipt, not on some later estimate.
Vendor credits, rebates and product returns should adjust the recorded unit cost of inventory — they should never be posted as miscellaneous income.
- Three-way match at receiving: BioTrack manifest, vendor invoice, physical count
- Inbound freight and direct acquisition costs folded into unit cost
- Credits and returns applied against inventory cost, never booked as income
- Consistent SKU mapping maintained between POS and the accounting system
Cash Room Procedures
Assign cash custody explicitly by role. Count cash at every transfer point with two employees and two signatures. Reconcile drawer counts to shift reports before the register closes. Maintain a vault log that ties to the ledger cash balance every single day.
Track over-and-short activity by shift and by employee. Patterns show up quickly and are far cheaper to address the moment they appear than months later.
Handling GRT and Excise Tax at the Register
Cannabis excise tax collected is a liability, not revenue, from the instant it hits the register. Gross Receipts Tax applies to adult-use sales but not to sales made to patients enrolled in the state medical cannabis program, so the POS configuration has to correctly distinguish the two customer types transaction by transaction.
Verify the POS tax configuration against current state rates on a fixed schedule, and retest it after any system update — a misconfigured tax rule can run undetected for months and compound into a serious remittance problem.
Retail Performance Analysis
Report gross margin by category and brand, basket size and transaction count by daypart, discount leakage as a share of gross sales, labor as a percentage of gross profit, and inventory turns by product class.
These numbers are what actually determine shelf allocation, staffing levels and promotional strategy — decisions whose consequences are all amplified under 280E.
