How Cannabis POS Helps Dispensaries and Retailers with Multi-Store Management

From ensuring the right inventory is in place, you are meeting all compliance regulations while running the business to ensuring complete security, managing a cannabis dispensary or retail outlet is not easy. But what’s tougher is multi-store management as your cannabis business grows. And that’s where a cannabis POS can help. 

In our previous blogs, we looked into how cannabis POS can help with inventory management and keeping up with compliance regulations. But in this one, we are going to deep dive into how it helps streamline operations for multi-store management. 

What is multi-store management for cannabis businesses?

Multi-store management refers to handling the managerial demands of operations across multiple outlets of the cannabis business. This includes managing the staff at each location, monitoring  sales, managing cash flow and reporting the sales and revenue generated by each location.

How does a cannabis POS help with multi-store management? 

The best cannabis POS systems like SellTreez create a single source of truth for all your stores, no matter how many locations and people you have. These stores include cannabis dispensaries, retail outlets and even eCommerce websites that can span multiple states.

1. Inventory control 

To be able to run multiple stores, your cannabis business will need to maintain inventory at different locations. But the inventory you’re allowed to store depends on both consumer needs and state regulations. This can make it harder for businesses to keep the right amount of stock at their locations, increasing the risks of understocking, overstocking and deadstocks. This is where mapping the Sellable Velocity with retail analytics becomes important. 

A cannabis POS system streamlines inventory management, enabling store managers and budtenders to update data in real-time so that you have an overview of the inventory available in total and measure the sellable velocity more accurately. 

Learn more about how cannabis POS systems help with inventory management here. 

2. Employee scheduling 

Running a cannabis business is no different from the regular companies. When you hire employees for multiple store locations, you will also need to set clear schedules and roles for your employees to keep things running in a streamlined way. 

The best cannabis POS software provides you with data and information on your employees to create work schedules. You can then use this information to create employee schedules in work management tools. 

3. User permissions 

Security of inventory and customer data is of utmost importance for cannabis businesses. But as your team grows across multiple locations, keeping complete control on who has access to what, why and what changes they can make, can become difficult - especially if you are still managing functions on a standardized cash register or spreadsheets. 

This is where having an enterprise-grade cannabis POS system like SellTreez comes in handy. It comes with an advanced set of features that allow you to set user permissions on the POS, limiting the number of people or the type of access they have across data sets. Being able to control accesses can save your cannabis business from data leaks and fraud. Additionally, it also helps you stay up-to-date with all the actions taken across all your stores. 

4. User onboarding 

When you start hiring for different stores, you will need all your staff and budtenders to become comfortable with certain processes. These include inventory management, how to ring up sales, how to store customer data and so on. 

A good cannabis POS makes this onboarding much simpler and less overwhelming by streamlining the number of steps any new employee needs to learn for any of these functions. Sell Treez for instance, comes with self-service user onboarding to make the learning curve friendlier. 

5. Retail analytics  

As your cannabis business grows, you will also need to look into which of the stores are the most profitable. This includes maintaining clear records of the number of sales made, the products sold, most popular products, low selling items, average value of sales, revenue generated and the profits made. 

A cannabis POS can help you get an overview of the performance of all stores and benchmark them to identify which is helping your business grow the fastest. Retail Analytics also helps with maintaining sales data for compliance purposes with state rules. 

6. Centralized discounting

Dispensaries and retail outlets often offer discounts to shoppers at the point of sale. Now discounts can heavily influence the profits you make on the sales and that’s why it is important to keep a close eye on the offers being made, most availed discounts and the average order value of these purchases. 

A cannabis POS system is capable of recording the discounts budtenders offer to buyers, helping you accurately calculate the revenue a sales has brought in for that specific store. This can also help identify which target markets are more discount-driven. 

Central discounting helps streamline pricing, discounting and coupons across all stores, which helps keep check on the bottom line revenue. 

7. Centralized customer relationship management 

Selling cannabis and marijuana products falls under a lot of state regulations. There are set rules on who a business can sell to, when and what for, along with a detailed process they need to follow. This requires the cannabis business to keep their customer data centralized - name, email address, phone number, address, previous purchases, payment modes and other information. As you start to run multiple stores for your cannabis business, it can become harder to manage this data in spreadsheets. 

A cannabis POS helps record all this data in a streamlined way, creating comprehensive customer profiles. This further helps in running personalized marketing campaigns to keep customers engaged, boosting brand loyalty over a period of time.   

8. Record keeping 

Apart from maintaining record of inventory and sales made, a cannabis business also needs to keep clear documentation on cash flow movement, expenses, adjustments made to inventory, void transactions, refunds and more, along with timestamps on recipeits. This can increase the paperwork and make it difficult for cannabis businesses to keep record for audits. 

A cannabis POS becomes a single source of truth for the smallest of such records. This makes it much simpler for when regulators require audit documentation. 

9. Ensuring compliance 

With all the above combined, a cannabis POS system plays a crucial role in ensuring your operation is in 100% compliance with state regulations. This is especially important for cannabis businesses with stores in different states as each may require adhering to a different set of rules and regulations on inventory, sales, customers, security and other parameters. 

A good cannabis POS allows you to make the adjustments needed for state-wise regulations from one dashboard, instead of using separate solutions to manage each store. This reduces the chances of slipping up on regulations, renewals, licenses and more. 

Learn more about how cannabis POS systems help maintain compliance. 

10. Employee performance

Another way in which cannabis dispensaries can use a POS is to monitor the performance of their employees at multiple locations. For instance, Treez comes with a budtender dashboard that shows how your budtenders/ sales associates are performing at individual stores and across all your stores.

This insight can help you identify your top performing employees and identify opportunities to help others upskill. 

11. Central product catalog

Managing inventory at multiple dispensary locations can be overwhelming and prone to errors. A good cannabis POS system like Treez can help streamline product creation and management across all stores, bringing all the information onto one dashboard. 

The centralized product catalog further helps remain consistent in the way consumers are educated about the items available, their pricing and dosage. 

12. Integration with ERP 

As you start to scale the operations at multiple locations, you will need to sync inventory data. A good cannabis POS system like Treez comes with integrations with Enterprise Resource Planning software like Distru to automatically intake inventory across retail stores, which is crucial for multi-state/ multi-location operators (particularly those who are vertically based).

Simplify multi-store management with a cannabis POS 

Cannabis POS systems have more than the role of just simplifying accepting and recording payments. With so much data stored in a POS system, cannabis businesses can put them to work to serve various other functions when equipped with the right feature sets. 

SellTreez is an enterprise-grade cannabis POS system that is built to help cannabis businesses scale. It streamlines the process of multi-store management by bringing all controls and functions onto one dashboard, giving you the ability to manage teams, accesses and more in one place.