Top Reports That Help Cannabis Growers Scale and Operate More Efficiently

The key to scaling operations and running your cannabis business more efficiently is to gain access to real-time data. It’s just as important to determine which reports you need and the information your managers and frontline staff want each report to convey.

The required information will vary by role. Some will want dashboards they can quickly access on their mobile devices. Others will want detailed spreadsheets. And those looking to discover the root causes of successes and failures will want the ability to drill down into the details behind each report.

To help you get started in producing the reports your team needs to scale your operations and run your business more efficiently, this blog presents the four key reporting areas for cannabis companies—cultivation, inventory, financial, and compliance—and the key information you need to generate.

Cultivation: What Will the Harvest Yield?

The primary cultivation report provides analysis across the plant lifecycle (propagation, vegetation, flowering, destroyed) and allows you to forecast the yield of bulk flower to expect, broken down by each plant type.

When will each plant be ready to be harvested? What amount of biomass material can you expect each plant to yield? In addition to helping your cultivation team determine if it’s on target to meet its goals, the results of this report will also help your manufacturing team plan what it will process, and your sales team will know what it can sell.

You will need to generate a similar report at the end of each harvest to look back on how your actual yield compares to the projected yield. If production fell short, you can drill down to see if it was caused by bad weather, a drought, or perhaps a bug infestation that forced you to destroy some plants. If production came out ahead, you can determine why and whether to increase your projections for the next harvest. Perhaps the mother plants are more fruitful than first realized.

Inventory: How Much Product Is Available to Sell?

The reports in this area of your business pertain to Material Requirements Planning: If the company harvests X grams of raw material, what types of products can you turn that into and how much? Do those numbers sync with customer demand? What do you need to do if you don’t have enough finished goods available? What can you do if you have too much?

To answer these questions, your warehouse team needs a report to keep close tabs on the status of your raw material, labels, boxes, and other packaging inventory. Is it in transit from cultivation? Are the products ready to be shipped, or are they still going through a manufacturing or packaging process?

From there, the sales team needs a report on what’s available to sell. It’s not enough to simply know the inventory count in the warehouse. The reports also need to include real-time updates on open sales and purchase orders—so the sales team doesn’t commit to a customer order that can’t be filled or turns down a customer they could have helped.

Financial: How Much Profit?

Here’s where your bean counters enter the picture. To start, they need high-level profit and loss reports that allow them to analyze revenue and costs. They then need to slice and dice the data so they can look at profit and loss by various filters: regions, customer types, customers, salespeople, production locations, product lines and strains.

As your financial team delves into cash flow, they will also need inventory reports that show them the quantities on hand and the value of each product. Did the company hamper cash flow by overstocking? Did it miss revenue opportunities by understocking?

From the margin perspective, it’s important to run reports on the efficiency of the workforce and the performance of machines used in the manufacturing and packaging processes. For example, how efficient is the warehouse staff in picking, packing, and shipping—all of which impact the total cost of products.

Compliance: How to Generate Audit Reports Quickly?

Compliance reports come in handy when audited by a state agency or it’s time to prove you conform to state regulations in how you handle any of your products containing THC. Although it’s required, nobody wants to spend an inordinate amount of time on compliance and divert their attention from running the business.

By maintaining detailed records about where your plants are and what form they are in—propagation, vegetation, flowering, destroyed, processing, or finished goods…and noted by a unique batch or tag—you can simply make a few clicks to submit your compliance reports. This includes uploading your data into a standardized state compliance tracking system such as Metrc or submitting to a state with no standardized system.

Either way, you can prove to the state that you keep track of THC material and have an audit trail of what’s happened to it. This includes records on destroyed products and components you do not sell, such as twigs that fall off of plants. You can present the weight and identify how you disposed of it, such as through incineration or mulch.

Streamlining the Reporting Process

As great as all these reports sound, you now need a way to get there. Many cannabis growers have streamlined their reporting processes with SilverLeaf.

The SilverLeaf platform, built on Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central, is designed specifically for the cannabis industry. The technology can integrate all areas of your business and the entire Microsoft ecosystem of tools, such as Microsoft Power BI. This allows you to report on and analyze your data from multiple angles while also using configurable controls to catch data anomalies and potential errors.

Silver Leaf helps your users organize reports to present data in the way that helps them most. And whether they rely on spreadsheets or visual reports, they can drill down into each report to get the details behind the data that help determine why something worked or why something went wrong—whether it’s due to a particular strain, location, or growing method.

To learn more about how SilverLeaf can help your cannabis company generate reports so you can scale your operations and run your business more efficiently, visit our website or contact us today.

Top Reports and Reporting Tools for the Cannabis Cultivators and Processors