POS, BioTrack and General Ledger Reconciliation
Every retail sale creates three separate records: the point-of-sale system, the state's track-and-trace system, and the accounting ledger. They diverge constantly — discounts, voids, employee purchases, samples, waste and manual BioTrack corrections all create drift between them.
We maintain a standing three-way tie-out. Gross receipts per POS reconcile to bank deposits and to ledger revenue. Units sold per POS reconcile to BioTrack package depletion. Variances are investigated at the SKU level and either explained or corrected before the period closes, because an unexplained inventory gap is both a licensing exposure and a tax exposure.
- Daily sales journal from POS to ledger with discount and refund detail
- Unit-level tie-out of POS depletion to BioTrack package activity
- Deposit-to-sales cash reconciliation with over/short tracking by shift
- Documented investigation of any variance above a set threshold
Cash Handling and Internal Controls
Limited banking access still leaves many New Mexico retailers handling meaningful volumes of currency, whether in Albuquerque, Rio Rancho or a border-market store near Sunland Park. Cash creates two distinct risks: internal loss, and the appearance of unreported income if an examination goes badly.
We build segregation of duties across the till, the vault and the deposit; require dual-signature counts; tie drawer totals to POS shift reports; and keep a vault log reconciled to the ledger every day. Where a business banks with a cannabis-compliant institution, we prepare the reporting packages that keep the relationship intact.
- Dual-control counts and signed count sheets at every custody transfer
- Shift-level over/short analysis trended by employee
- Daily vault log reconciled to the ledger
- Deposit documentation packages for cannabis-friendly banking programs
Cannabis Excise Tax, GRT and Retailer Obligations
Adult-use retail sales in New Mexico carry the state cannabis excise tax, administered by the Taxation and Revenue Department at a rate that steps up annually toward its statutory ceiling, alongside Gross Receipts Tax. Medical cannabis sales to enrolled patients are exempt from both GRT and the excise tax, which means a retailer serving both markets needs a point-of-sale system configured to tell the two apart on every transaction.
We configure and test the POS tax setup, sample transactions across both channels to confirm accuracy, and prepare filings on a fixed calendar so returns and payments are never funded out of surprise. There is no separate New Mexico cultivation tax, which simplifies the tax stack relative to some other states, but GRT sourcing rules by location still need to be tracked for operators with stores in more than one municipality.
Inventory Valuation and Retail COGS
As a reseller under 280E, a dispensary has a narrow inventoriable cost profile: invoice price plus the cost of acquiring the product. Getting that number right depends on accurate landed cost per unit, disciplined receiving, and a physical count process that actually agrees with the system of record.
We standardize receiving so every purchase order ties to a vendor invoice, a BioTrack transfer, and an inventory receipt at a specific unit cost. Cycle counts rotate through the store on a schedule, with a full count at period end. Shrink is measured, categorized and reported rather than absorbed quietly into margin.
Management Reporting That Drives Retail Decisions
Compliance reporting tells you what already happened. Management reporting tells you what to do next. We report gross margin by category and brand, basket size and ticket count by daypart, discount leakage, labor as a percentage of gross profit, and inventory turns by SKU class.
Those numbers answer the questions New Mexico retailers actually face: which brands are earning their shelf space, whether a Las Cruces or Sunland Park border-market location is capturing enough Texas-side traffic to justify its lease, and how deep a promotion can run before it erodes margin the federal return will never give back.
- Gross margin by category, brand and SKU
- Discount and promotion leakage analysis
- Labor efficiency measured against gross profit, not revenue
- Inventory turns, days on hand and aged-stock exposure
The Daily Close in a New Mexico Retail Environment
Retail cannabis generates hundreds of transactions a day across cash, debit workarounds and increasingly ACH-based payment rails, in a store where the product is tracked by the state and the till is counted by hand. The close discipline that makes this work is daily, not monthly: shift-level cash counts under dual control, a signed over/short log, a deposit prepared and logged the same day, and a POS Z-report reconciled to both the deposit and the ledger.
A Santa Fe storefront running 400 tickets a day with an average basket of $62 moves roughly $9,000,000 of gross receipts a year through that process. A one percent unexplained variance is $90,000 — more than the cost of the controls that would have prevented it, and exactly the kind of pattern that turns a routine examination into a difficult one.
We implement the control set, then audit it monthly: variance trend by shift and by budtender, void and discount frequency by employee, and refunds against the exception policy. Controls that nobody reviews stop being controls.
- Dual-control counts at open, shift change and close
- Sequential deposit log tied to the armored carrier manifest
- Daily POS-to-ledger reconciliation with documented variance explanations
- Monthly exception review of voids, discounts and returns by employee
Landed Cost, Category Margin and Merchandising Decisions
Because a retailer's inventoriable cost is narrow, the accuracy of landed cost per unit at receiving determines the entire federal tax position. Invoice price, inbound freight where the retailer bears it, and permitted acquisition costs go into unit cost at the moment product is received and the BioTrack transfer is accepted — not estimated later from a vendor statement.
That same unit cost drives merchandising. Category margin reporting shows what flower, vape, edibles, pre-rolls and accessories each contribute after cost, and brand-level reporting shows which vendor relationships are actually profitable once discounting and slow-moving inventory are considered. In a market with real price competition, a Rio Rancho retailer that reallocated shelf space toward two high-turn categories improved blended margin by four points without raising a single price.
We also report days-on-hand by SKU. Cannabis inventory ages badly, and product written down or destroyed at the back of the store is margin that federal tax law will not give back.
