When Brittany was brought into her job at the dispensary in Washington, the inventory system she inherited was a mess. There was an entire room filled with old returns that vendors hadn’t accepted. This was dead money. Many of these items would have to be destroyed. Worse still, a good portion of the inventory wasn’t properly accounted for in the traceability system. Brittany had a real mess on her hands. It was so bad in fact, that when she went to clean up some old edibles that were left sitting on the floor ,Brittany was attacked by and had to fight off a giant rat that had staked its own claim to the store’s inventory.

You should always follow the ‘First-in, first out’ rule of thumb which means that the oldest products are being cycled out first ensuring that customers will be getting the freshest products possible and that older inventory doesn’t get stuck languishing in obscurity on the back of the shelf.

There’s nothing worse than buying a joint only to get it home and have it turn to dust because it was made from an ancient, three year old batch of trim.

You also want to track the wholesale price of your inventory batches, so that you can appropriately price productsat the counter when the revenue stream allows it. This could allow for discounts that could be the result of a reduced cost for lower quality products, if you are tracking it. The same goes for a higher-potency product, often translating to a higher wholesale price, which you can then easily pass to the consumer, as long as the increase is warranted.

If you don’t have a good inventory system in place, disaster will surely follow. When you take into account the state traceability requirements, not having an organized digital inventory system in place is a recipe for terrible, terrible consequences.

Even the smallest stores could have thousands of SKUs, creating exponentially even more opportunities for human error.

Beyond avoiding the worst-case scenarios of suspensions, fines, product and license seizures, a proper inventory management system will give you the information you need to know how to most efficiently buy and sell products, and crucially will inform your decision making in budgeting and cash flow management.

If you have real time analytics you can see right away if a product line isn’t moving. This basic business intelligence gives you flexibility if you need to sell it on a promotional discount in order to cut your losses before the product gets even older and the quality and salability are that much further decreased.

 Returns, if allowed in your market, are not ideal for your vendor either. The products you’re sending back are likely to have a depleted shelf life if they’re still even sellable from a quality standpoint.  For whatever painstaking duration of time that your flowers have been languishing unsold on your shelves, like a sad, aging orphan, that keeps getting passed by, day by day, your flowers will lose their character, from the light and the ambient heat, and may even run away to pursue a life of crime and delinquency.

Remember what we learned earlier about the degradation of your terpenes and THC, so please don’t make light of photophobia.

In practice, returns can be impractical and expensive for your vendor especially if they’re coming from far away. If they have to process too many returns, and spend endlessly on overhead to chase down losses then they’ll go out of business before too long.

Working things out with your vendor and making their lives as easy as possible will pay off in the long run. Not only through another deposit in your bank of goodwill, but likely in your actual bank account too, when your customers respond well to the best products at the best prices around.