By Chris Guthrie, Director of Go-to-Market, Innovia Consulting
Jason Agouris of iTristan and I have spent the past few weeks building a webinar
together, and we kept coming back to a single product page. It’s for a 1g Tangie-infused pre-roll, and it shows a lot number, a THC percentage, an expiration date, a price, and a button that says “Order.” It looks simple and trustworthy, which is exactly what a product page is supposed to do.
The question we couldn’t stop asking was where every one of those numbers came from. For a lot of cannabis operators, the honest answer is a file named something like Item_List_EXPORT_FINAL_v3 (2).xlsx. (We’re walking through the alternative live on
October 6, and I’ll share the details at the end.)
Nobody sets out to run a business on a spreadsheet. It happens a little at a time.
Cultivation tracks plants in one place, production logs batches in another, lab results
arrive as PDFs in someone’s inbox, and sales keeps its own price list, because of course it does. Eventually someone, usually the most organized person in the building and usually on a Friday afternoon, pulls it all together. That file becomes the item master, and the item master becomes what your customer sees.
Open one of those files and the symptoms are familiar. The same preroll is entered three different ways. There’s “TBD” where a potency number should be, a price cell that just says #VALUE!, and a tab called “Item Master” sitting next to one called “Item Master (2)” and another called “DO NOT EDIT.” Nobody did anything wrong here. It’s simply what happens when four teams, working in four systems at four different times, get reconciled by hand.
Then you load it into your store. Some rows fail, which is annoying but is actually the good news, because at least you know about them. The bad news is the rows that
went through before the import stopped. Now some listings are live and some aren’t, a few are showing last month’s potency, and somebody gets to spend an afternoon working out which is which. Next week, when inventory changes, you get to do it all again.
Your buyer never sees any of that. They just see a wrong number on a product page, and in a regulated industry, a wrong number is never just a typo. It’s a compliance question, a customer service call, and a small withdrawal from the trust your brand has been building.
Before I worked on the software side, I held a cannabis license in Washington, and what Jason and I will show on October 6 is the predictive ERP flow I wanted in those early
days. It isn’t a better spreadsheet. It’s a different starting point.
The idea is to record everything once, where the work actually happens. The grow is planned in the same system that orders the materials, so cultivation and purchasing work from the same numbers. Every plant gets an ID on day one, and harvest weights are scanned straight to the plant instead of copied off a clipboard. When flower becomes distillate and distillate becomes a preroll, every input carries its lot along with it. Lots sit in quarantine until testing clears, and they’re released with their results attached.
By the time a product is ready to sell, everything a customer needs to know is already on record. Nobody exported it, nobody cleaned it up, and nobody guessed. That’s the foundation 365 Cannabis is built on, running on Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central.
Clean data is only half the job, though. You still have to sell the product, and your buyers expect ordering from you to feel as easy as the rest of their online shopping.
That’s where SellStack comes in. Built by iTristan Group, it connects to 365 Cannabis and turns lot-level data into a storefront buyers actually enjoy using. Products can be
offered by lot, the oldest inventory sells first, and buyers only see what’s approved for
their state.
Those features only work if the data underneath them is right. A storefront that sells by lot needs lots it can trust. Put a great storefront on top of a messy item list and you get a beautiful way to show customers the wrong number.
So here’s a question worth asking before your next import: is your storefront reading
from a record, or from a reconciliation?
On Tuesday, October 6, at 2 PM ET / 1 PM CT, Jason and I will follow a cannabis
product’s journey from the plant to the page your customer buys from. We’ll show where every number on that page comes from, and what it looks like when your storefront reads from the same record your grow created. No spreadsheet required.
Register for the webinar →Register Today!
