We get it: taxes, regulatory costs, and other hurdles inherent to cannabis retail can make margins thin.

Where dispensaries really stretch margins and make concrete gains is with operational efficiencies and smart, compliant workflows. California has a unique set of cannabis regulations, and not all software is built with workflows to make it easy to meet all of California's unique state and local requirements.

Here are 3 reasons why dispensaries that cobble together four or five different software services to power their dispensary operations (POS, delivery, loyalty program, text marketing, eCommerce, etc) are unfortunately not running as an efficient cannabis retail operation as possible:

1. Loss of Valuable Customer & Sales Data

If you require three or four different software subscriptions each month to run your dispensary marketing and sales, it's likely that a couple of the platforms don't work together, and data may be getting lost or corrupted as it moves from one system to another. Your dispensary data is extremely valuable to help you understand who your customers are, what they're buying, when and where, and if you can't easily find this information (and more importantly, trust the data), your business is operating below its true revenue potential. Further, you should be able to put that historic data to work to send targeted marketing to your customers with deals and offers tailored to their shopping patterns and preferences for the greatest ROI.

2. Missing Compliance Guardrails

Some cannabis POS systems have the proper guardrails in place to keep you 100% compliant in the state you operate in; others will let you oversell and go into negative inventory. In California, you are required to keep your inventory variance below 3%; if you are consistently reporting inaccurate data (or worse, not reporting data at all) you are putting your hard-earned license at risk by remaining out of compliance.

If you discover one of these Metrc red flags, it's likely you will then need to hire cannabis consultants and/or lawyers to clean up data inaccuracies and discrepancies.

It's important to know which regulatory environment your POS system is built for. If a cannabis retail software system is designed to operate in many states and countries, it's likely a sign that the system doesn't work perfectly in any single location (at this stage in cannabis legalization, there are wildly different regulations in each legal market and most teams have not yet created region-specific compliance guardrails for every single requirement in that market).

3. Unnecessarily High Labor Costs

Hiring Metrc consultants to find and fix compliance errors can add up quickly, especially if your Metrc account has been out of compliance for prolonged periods of time. Often, when using multiple pieces of software to run your dispensary, your team will be expected to download CSVs from platform and reupload it into another one, which leads to more labor costs, repetitive data entry, and often, less satisfied employees. When you are deciding which software you will use for different parts of your dispensary operations, you want to evaluate what clunky workarounds may be required to pair various cannabis softwares together.


Meadow’s Connected Solution for Smarter Dispensary Management

You could cobble together different software services, but hundreds of storefront dispensaries and delivery teams across California choose Meadow to manage their operations, grow their sales, and reduce their workload.

A fully connected cannabis POS system, designed specifically for California compliance, can truly save you thousands of dollars every year by:

  1. Creating valuable sales and customer data
  2. Funneling that data into targeted marketing campaigns from the same system
  3. Helping you sleep at night knowing you're fully compliant
  4. Reducing unnecessary labor costs
  5. Letting your team focus their energy not on mundane data entry but on more satisfying & revenue-generating tasks

Learn more about Meadow's approach to connected cannabis retail.

Martin Olive Vapor Room dispensary Meadow cannabis POS review
Hear more about how Martin and his team at Vapor Room are getting real value from using a connected, all-in-one cannabis retail platform

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