Mastering Cannabis Operations – Part 4: Reporting and Business Intelligence    

Sara Silver—our Director of Horticulture Solutions—and Matt Goodson—a Senior Consultant for Velosio—present the reporting and business intelligence (BI) capabilities you can leverage in SilverLeaf, which integrates all the functions to optimize your cannabis business and runs on top of the best-in-class ERP platform, Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central.

If you manage a cannabis business and are looking to generate better insights into the performance of your operations, check out part four of our Mastering Cannabis Operations webinar series.

During the webinar, Sara and Matt show screenshots of the different tools you can use to generate data in SilverLeaf through graphic reports and dashboards. For example, you can set up a dashboard on your home page to see current plants in production—sorted by plant type, vegetative phase, and other filters you can customize. You can also drill into metric tag information to see the cultivation process for each plant. Other tag disposition insights you can mine include whether any plants within a certain batch had to be destroyed or were turned into mothers.

Another handy feature is the ability to define your grow defaults to identify what to expect each plant to harvest and the mortality rate. Based on all your grow defaults, you can see, for instance, the projected biomass per plant along with how many plants are expected so you can determine the total biomass output.

A Wide Variety of Reports

Here’s a quick rundown of other reports Sara and Matt explain during the webinar:

• Inventory—evaluate all inventory items based on quantity on hand, their value, and other attributes.
• Multi-entity financial statements—view income and expense statements by the parent company and then break down revenue and costs across multiple sub-entities.
• Product revenue and cost—analyze revenue and cost by the current time period vs. the same period last year, the current year vs. the prior year, or any other time periods you need to compare. You can also break down the reports to look at revenue and costs by plant type, by product categories (cartridges, edibles, flowers), and by subcategories (strains and variants).
• Customers—determine which customers are buying which products, sorted by categories and subcategories. You can break the data down further by location for each customer with multiple ship-to addresses. Also analyze credits by reason code for returns by each customer to analyze the cause.

Another report our cannabis customers find helpful is productivity analysis—to compare sales and operational performance of locations, regions, and individuals as well as warehouse personnel picking and packing orders. This information helps you establish incentive and training programs to improve productivity across your company.

Custom Reporting

While SilverLeaf comes with hundreds of standard reports, Velosio can help you create custom reports tailored to any specific business process you need to assess. For example, during the webinar, Sara and Matt presented a customer harvest report that analyzes finished goods performance.

The customer this was written for wanted to understand what they produce from bulk flower lots—such as the amount of biomass and the amount of waste. They also wanted to see how long the flower phase lasted and when flowers were harvested. All this information provides a better understanding of the overall yield from the original biomass to the finished good output. The customer can look at the results monthly, quarterly, or yearly, and compare the data across multiple cultivators.

We also developed another custom harvest report for a customer who wanted to analyze batches by measuring the number of plants produced in comparison to the square feet of the canopy. They can compare the expected biomass production versus actual production.

For a third customer, we created an unscheduled orders report to help them identify orders that have been scheduled for delivery versus orders that have not been scheduled. The report alerts the customer when someone submits a new order who already has another order in the system that is scheduled to ship. The customer can then make sure both orders go out at the same time.

Another helpful custom report is manifest tracking. When orders are created, the delivery tracking mechanism populates the manifest with information such as the driver and the vehicle assigned to the order. This is particularly helpful for cannabis operators in states where the Metrc regulatory system is in effect.

Flexibility to Expand Reporting Capabilities

As the rundown of these reports demonstrates, SilverLeaf offers you many ways to slice and dice your data. The reports and dashboards are easy to create and do not require technical skills.

You can also expand your report capabilities with built-in integrations to Microsoft Power BI and Microsoft Office. These connections allow users to export SilverLeaf and Power BI reports to Excel in case they need to do some additional data manipulation and are more comfortable using Excel.

To learn more about the reporting capabilities of SilverLeaf and find out why many of our customers consider the platform to be the “Green Thumb” of cloud ERP and cannabis management, check out the full webinar. SilverLeaf is the only cannabis software that’s approved by Microsoft on its AppSource platform. The solution has provided cannabis operators with industry best practices for more than eight years and is validated in 15+ states across the US.

And if you need help in deploying a new ERP platform to run your cannabis business more efficiently, contact SilverLeaf today.