Manage Your Dispensary Efficiently & Remain Compliant With Rules & Regulations

This paper outlines the guidelines governing the Medical Marijuana Industry. It provides an insightful guide to using Point of Sale Solutions to manage your dispensary and comply with the specific laws of this industry.
The medical Marijuana industry is booming nowadays thanks to the legalization of its use now in 14 States. The latest state to pass a bill legalizing the use of medicinal marijuana was New Jersey on Jan 12th, 2010.

Although legalized, medical marijuana dispensaries are controlled by many rules and regulations to help avoid the use of such establishments as a front for drug dealers. The measures taken by the 14 concerned states include but not limited to, background checks on operators, control over growing and distributing, control over the types of patients that could be approved to use the medicinal marijuana, as well as strict rules regarding documentation, inventory control, and tax accounting. Not complying with any of the rules set by the concerned state, or with federal guidelines will result in the loss of operating license and most likely along with legal action against the business.

We all remember how the D.E.A raided dozens of medical marijuana dispensaries in Los Angeles shutting down most of them and pursuing legal action against several individuals. The affected dispensaries had one thing in common: they did not comply with one of the rules. The justice department has repeatedly announced that medical marijuana dispensaries are not to be targeted by law enforcement provided they are compliant with federal and state guidelines.
Why Dispensaries need Point of Sale Solutions:

Maintain Compliance with Federal And State Guidelines of Medical Marijuana Dispensaries

Here are the main issues you will encounter running a medical marijuana dispensary in order to remain compliant with federal and state guidelines and to avoid being shut down:

1. Always remember that you are operating a pharmacy and that you are selling prescription drugs. Accordingly, documentation is a necessity given the dispensary needs to be able to identify, and file customers, to track and monitor past and present purchases of each patient, and to ensure the validity of their identification cards as well as their recommendations or prescriptions.
2. Whether you are growing your own supplies or you are purchasing them from an authorized seller, you have to keep precise account of the inventory you are carrying, the purchase price or growing cost, and the list of your suppliers. You are required by law to report your inventory, its sources, and its costs.
3. Speaking of inventory, you need to update it on a daily basis to reflect the transactions occurring everyday. In addition to that, since most dispensaries if not all carry several types of prescription marijuana, you need to keep account of every type of strains individually.
4. Medical marijuana dispensaries use a non-linear pricing structure where the price per quantity decreases as the quantity increases but not proportionally making it somewhat complicated to process transactions in terms of tracking sales and updating inventory; however you must be able to do so. Manually processing and tracking inventory is a very time-consuming process and it allows for a lot of mistakes which calls for another time-consuming process, auditing.
5. Most dispensaries use some sort of loyalty program where they give small amounts of strains for free with purchases. For example, patients might be getting 1.2 grams for the price of 1 gram. The dispensary in this case needs to account for these free of charge small amounts –usually called compassion gifts- for two reasons. First, you need to account for them in inventory. Second, you need to be able to write these compassion gifts off your taxes.

These are some of the specific needs of this industry. While some dispensary owners and operators opted for manual documentation, manual transactions management using cash register, and manual inventory control, some others are using the better, easier, more efficient, and more productive way- Point of Sale Solutions.
Why Dispensaries Need Point of Sale Solutions:

Running a medical Marijuana dispensary can get somewhat complicated and demanding because of all the laws and regulations governing this type of business. Because of the controversial nature of this industry, authorities are more inclined to exert stricter control over such operations in order to ensure the compliance of dispensaries to the rules. In order to do so, medical marijuana dispensaries’ operators are required to ensure the proper implementation of the following tasks:

* Documentation.
* Customer database.
* Customer tracking.
* Menu build-up.
* Transactions management.
* Full circle inventory control.
* Sales reporting.
* Sales tax reporting.

While some operators might try to implement these manually but it has been proven over and over that this is a very time and energy consuming process, allows for a lot of mistakes, requires auditing on a regular basis, and is not productive and efficient. The best way to manage a medical marijuana dispensary is to use a fully comprehensive point of sale solution; however not every point of sale solution is the right one for this type of business. A dispensary is to a certain extent the combination of a pharmacy and a café. That’s why the right point of sale solution needs to accommodate for these two ends of the business: the medical practice side and the “food/beverages” service side. Our point of sale solution has been specifically tailored to meet both ends by providing the right tools to implement the tasks we previously mentioned efficiently and effectively.

Simplify Managing Your Medical Marijuana Dispensary with our Software:

1. POS systems available on the market lack the right tools and features to manage medical practice businesses except for specialized solutions. However, these specialized medical practice transactions management systems lack the necessary tools to manage businesses such as cafes, bars, or retail stores. Ours does though. Combining our experience in the medical field as well as in the hospitality industry along with the extensive research we did on the medical marijuana dispensaries industry and its requirements have enabled us to tailor our POS solution to the specific needs of this industry. Documentation has never been easier; we enable you to easily add customers to your database, input their personal and medical information, attach prescriptions and identification cards to their files, and link all transactions to the corresponding customers’ files.
2. Customer database are be maintained locally. We provide on-site back up options and off-site.
3. Patient Relations are imporved using our storage of files, patient history, this eliminates the need to maintain an archive of big paper files for customers. In the matter of seconds, you can be looking at all the information of any customer you choose and pull out individual reports.
4. After consulting with many medical marijuana dispensaries operators about the structure of pricing, the different weights, the price discounts, the compassion gifts, the different grades of products, the different categories of products, etc we've become experts in the industry. We've built and configured a dispensary menu layout that enables you to process your daily transactions the easiest and the most efficient way possible.
5. Inventory control is one of the biggest and most important issues to this type of business. Our solution supports such inventory control practices and enables you to check your inventory at any point in time. Second, you are required by law to keep account of your inventory. Here are some of the issues you might encounter doing this:

• Medical marijuana dispensaries usually purchase their supplies in ounces; however they sell in grams. Well, our solution supports measuring units’ conversion and will update your inventory accordingly.
• Dispensaries offer food items cooked with medicinal marijuana and you need to account for the portion used to make every certain item. Our solution supports recipe inventory control as well; the inventory will be depleted accordingly every time a food item is purchased.
• Inputting inventory can be a hassle sometimes but our solution enables you to update your inventory from your scale directly. Since our solution supports scale integration, you can just put the strain you’re purchasing on the scale, select the concerned inventory item and it will be added automatically.
• Updating the accounting side of inventory can be a time-consuming process also; however we enable you to input your cost in the POS and you will be able to run cost analysis and profit reports right from your terminal without having to use a spreadsheet.

So our solution in summary enables you to implement a full circle inventory control process that is user friendly, and effective.

6.  for compliance purposes, reporting is also very crucial to such businesses. CCS has 70 report types plus the built-in ability to custom build a specific report based on hundreds of criteria makes us among the industry leaders in reporting features. To make it better, we are always here to build any type of report you ever thought of. We are a customer-oriented company not a reseller-oriented company like many of our competitors; therefore we listen to our customers and we take pride in solving their problems. Whether it is sales reporting, auditing reporting, tax reporting, or any other type of reporting, our solutions rank high in rapport to the industry standards.

Related Articles:

• Medical marijuana dispensaries thrive in Colorado.
• Los angeles California. to Shutter Hundreds of Medical Marijuana Dispensaries
• Medical marijuana dispensaries will no longer be prosecuted, U.S. attorney general says
• Oregon Medical Marijuana Dispensary Laws Proposed
• The Best Point Of Sale Solutions For Medical Marijuana Dispensaries.