Effectively managing inventory is a top priority for cannabis dispensary owners and managers.
Knowing where your cannabis inventory is, how much of it you have on hand, and when you’ll need to reorder products is an essential part of the business for adequately serving your customers and competing in an increasingly crowded industry space.
For cannabis dispensaries, managing inventory can be difficult. Inventory can often make up a significant portion of a business’s expenses and it must be managed properly if it is to remain profitable.
But when it comes to cannabis businesses, there’s also the concern about dispensary compliance. It’s imperative these days that cannabis retailers of all types and sizes have the right tools and technology to simplify the inventory management processes, eliminate tedious manual work, and better organize your ever growing cannabis inventory. Below are a few tips for dispensary owners and managers to help make inventory management for your dispensary easy & profitable.
1: Inventory Audit Standards
Auditing your inventory, or the process of physically counting all the cannabis products in your store is critical for accurate reporting and overall dispensary compliance.
Inventory audit best practices for dispensaries:
- Define your store’s audit processes
- Delegate roles & responsibilities for your staff
- Create a Standard Operating Procedures Manual
- Require your staff to use your SOP
- Implement dispensary training for employees
- Run inventory audits weekly
2: Integrate Dispensary Inventory Management Software
Software makes things easy. So, you’ll need to choose a simple, yet robust dispensary inventory management solution to help manage your cannabis inventory. You’ll also want to make sure your dispensary POS system integrates with other tools, like updating inventory availability in real-time with dispensary menus for online customers, and more.
The most important integration for any cannabis dispensary inventory management software system is Metrc, which is an inventory tracking system that state regulators use to monitor activity and overall dispensary compliance. This allows you to:
- Import new packages and inventory from Metrc
- Verify package tags with pre-populated inventory information
- Push sales reports to Metrc daily or automatically after each sale
- Reconcile physical and reported dispensary inventory with the Metrc Reporting
A Metrc Discrepancy Report will only help you analyze inconsistencies between your dispensary’s inventory software system and Metrc inventories by providing an itemized spreadsheet of errors so you can easily track down and fix any and all mistakes.
3: Product Order Planning
Although dispensaries will often put a massive effort into inventory planning, they will undoubtedly run into situations that throw a monkey wrench into their best-laid plans, such as:
- External factors may cause specific products to sell more quickly (or more slowly) than you expected.
- Sales spikes based on seasonality, discounts, and regulatory changes can cause product shortages.
- A new product disconnect with customers and your stock sits on your shelf taking up space that should be delegated to better-selling products.
- New legal regulations can change products or processes dramatically.
- Cash flow issues impede your ability to purchase other needed products.
- Vendor or transportation delays due to staffing, weather, etc.
Regardless of what number of issues may arise internally or externally, it’s critical that all retail cannabis dispensaries have contingency plans in place for the unexpected.
4: Use a Mobile Inventory App
If you’re trying to keep track of and manage your cannabis product inventory by hand, you’re not only running a high probability of human error, but you will also waste your precious time. Managing dispensary inventory is very time-consuming and it’s important to streamline processes for your team and avoid as many costly mistakes as possible.
The right inventory management tech will save your team hours and hours every single day on auditing and managing your dispensary’s inventory. For example, you could utilize Flowhub’s dispensary inventory management Stash app which makes it super easy to conduct regular inventory audits simply by scanning package tags or SKU’s and confirming amounts rather than counting by hand.
With this, your staff can also set up discrepancy approval workflows so that a manager can double-check their work and investigate any errors before reporting everything to Metrc compliance.
When using a robust cannabis retail management platform, like Flowhub or dispensary inventory management, point of sale, and compliance, your dispensary operations will run smooth and profits can be substantially higher than they would without using these cannabis technology software solutions.
At the end of the day, inventory control is the machine that drives growth and stability in retail cannabis dispensaries. Your store’s ability to effectively store, track, and analyze your product stock allows your dispensary to be far more effective, agile, and responsive to the ever-changing customer demands that arise.
