Revenue Recording and POS Discipline
Record gross sales, discounts, refunds and excise tax as separate line items. Netting them together hides the leakage that determines retail profitability and complicates every reconciliation that follows.
Tie deposits to the sales journal every day, not to the bank statement once a month. That distinction matters the moment anyone asks whether all revenue was actually reported.
Receiving and Landed Cost
Because a dispensary's COGS is limited to the cost of acquiring product, landed unit cost accuracy is essentially the entire federal tax position. Match every receipt to a vendor invoice and a manifest, and record unit cost at the point of receipt.
Vendor credits, rebates and returns should adjust unit cost, not get posted as miscellaneous income.
- Three-way match at receiving: manifest, invoice, physical count
- Inbound freight and acquisition costs included in unit cost
- Credits and returns adjusted against inventory cost, never income
- Consistent SKU mapping between the POS system and the general ledger
Cash Room Procedures
Assign custody explicitly. Count at every transfer with two people and two signatures. Reconcile drawer counts to shift reports. Maintain a vault log that ties to the ledger balance daily.
Track over-and-short by shift and by employee. Patterns surface quickly and cost far less to address early than late.
TPT and Excise Tax Handling at the Register
Collected excise tax is a liability, not revenue, and must be segregated from operating cash. Arizona's TPT applies to the retail transaction, with a 5.6% state rate plus applicable county and municipal rates layered on top depending on the store's location.
Medical patient sales are exempt from the 16% adult-use excise tax but remain subject to TPT, so the point-of-sale system needs separate tax logic for medical and adult-use transactions. Verify configuration after every system update, and retest before the first sale under any rate change.
Retail Performance Analysis
Report gross margin by category and brand, basket size and transaction count by daypart, discount leakage, labor as a percentage of gross profit, and inventory turns by SKU class.
Those figures drive shelf allocation, staffing levels and promotional strategy — decisions with amplified consequences under 280E.
