Cannabis might be the most dynamic industry in the United States today where laws evolve to meet growing demand. Perhaps the toughest—and most important—of these changes is to stay on top of the shifting cannabis compliance issues.
The constant state of regulatory flux in legal cannabis won’t be changing anytime soon. As of this post, there are presently 11 states (plus the District of Columbia) where cannabis is recreationally legal and many more where its status is at least semi-legal; there are only nine states where marijuana remains entirely illegal.
Marijuana’s legalization is well underway, but as each new jurisdiction legalizes cannabis, new local regulations can place further compliance strictures on a cannabusiness.
On top of having to comply with endlessly complex regulations surrounding the legal status of cannabis in different states, cannabis companies also have to navigate the extraordinarily complicated—and largely prohibitive—financial regulations handed down by the federal government, which is expressly unfriendly to the industry.
Luckily, ERP systems help cannabis companies deal with all of these problematic compliance tasks. It’s worth noting that not all ERP systems will be equally useful to cannabis industry operators; a cannabis-specific ERP system is more suited to the task of staying in compliance versus a broad ERP system made for general manufacturing.
So, how does ERP help?
Most of the compliance issues regarding legal cannabis boil down to requiring highly articulated tracking, which is how ERP systems excel as business tools.
Manufacturing operations with complex job processes and inventory and logistics systems were among the first to adopt ERP technology decades ago, so their uses port over to the tracking needs of the cannabis industry quite naturally.
However, because of the complexity of cannabis tracking requirements at every level of the business, generic ERP systems are not up to the task of maintaining compliance.
Learn more about important differences in Seed-to-Sale software
Complex Tracking Simplified
You’ll be able to readily and thoroughly track all product materials from growing materials and nutrients to seeds, to plants, to finalized products with the right ERP system implemented into your business. Because ERP systems unify all business data under the same software umbrella, they also make it easy to track which employees interact with what products and what stage of their lifecycle, which is another complicated and vital component of compliance in the cannabis industry.
RFID is an invaluable tool for cannabis compliance by giving cannabis operators a way to keep track of inventory as it relates to the quality and compliance of their products.
Similarly, ERP’s integration with your financial processes streamlines the tracking the flow of money related to sales, vendor purchasing, payroll, etc.
Automatic Updates for Compliance
Cannabis-specific ERP systems include automatic updating features. It can be tough to stay on top of legality regulations because of how often the legal status of cannabis changes around the country. Cannabis-specific ERPs track these changes automatically and update accordingly, which vastly simplifies the compliance team’s job of staying on top of the changes manually.
The right cannabis ERP affords operators peace of mind knowing that they’re on top of current regulations with automatic updates. With these matters handled, you’ll be able to turn more of your attention to scaling your operation to maintain a competitive advantage in such a complex industry.
