Most dispensaries know what they owe. Far fewer know how long each vendor has been waiting — and that second number is the one that decides whether a vendor keeps taking your calls.
A list of open invoices sorted by date received tells you nothing about urgency. An invoice from three months ago and one from last Tuesday sit side by side, the same size, in the same font. So the vendor who gets paid ends up being the one who emailed most recently, or the one whose rep happened to stop by. That is not a payment strategy. It is a squeaky-wheel policy, and it quietly punishes the vendors patient enough not to chase you.
An accounts payable aging report fixes that with one idea: group everything you owe by how far past its due date it is.
What an aging report actually shows
Every open payable falls into one bucket based on its due date. Anything not yet due is current. Everything else is late, in thirty-day bands:
A $12,288 payables book. The same twelve thousand dollars a plain invoice list would show you — but now the shape of the problem is obvious.
Look at that last column. The single biggest concentration of money isn't in what's due soon, it's in what has been sitting for more than three months. That is an extremely common shape, and it is invisible on any screen that doesn't sort by age. Those bands are the same ones a QuickBooks A/P Aging Summary uses, so your bookkeeper reads it without translation.
Why the 91+ column is the one that matters
Vendors do not usually announce that they've written you off. What happens is quieter: allocation slips. The new drop goes to the dispensary that pays. Your rep stops pushing for you internally. Terms tighten from Net 30 to COD without a conversation. By the time somebody says something out loud, you have already lost the relationship.
Ninety days is roughly where that turn happens in cannabis wholesale, and it is exactly the range a due-date-sorted list buries — because the oldest invoices are the ones furthest from the top of your inbox.
The vendor who has waited 130 days is not going to call you. They are going to stop calling you.
One book, not three
Dispensaries usually keep vendor payables in at least three mental piles: wholesale cannabis purchases, non-cannabis operating bills like rent and insurance, and consignment settlements owed to brands whose product sold through.
Those are genuinely different arrangements. They are not different bank accounts. When you sit down on Thursday with a fixed amount of cash, they all compete for the same dollars, and any report that shows you only one of them is telling you a fraction of the truth. A useful aging schedule puts all three in one table and labels which is which.
Turning the report into a decision
The report is only worth the time if it ends in a payment. That means working from a real number, not a feeling:
- Start with the cash you actually have for vendor payments this week — after payroll, after taxes, after the rest of it.
- Work down from the oldest. The vendor at the top has been waiting longest; that is the whole point of the sort.
- Watch the running total against your number. The moment the selection crosses it, you know it — before you've committed to anything.
- Send them together. Paying one vendor at a time is where afternoons go.
Worked against the book above, with $6,000 available:
Two payments, under budget, and the oldest debt in the business is gone. The next vendor down — 52 days late at $1,933 — doesn't fit, so it moves to next week with a clear reason rather than by accident.
Two things worth knowing before you pay
What you owe and what leaves the bank are different numbers
If a vendor has approved credit memos sitting on their account — for returns, destroyed product, or a co-marketing markdown they agreed to fund — those come off before a check is cut. The amount owed and the cash that actually leaves your account are two separate figures, and a payment screen that shows only one of them will surprise you. How approved vendor credits get applied covers the mechanics.
The same vendor can appear twice, legitimately
A brand you buy wholesale from can also have product on your shelf on consignment. That means an open purchase order and a live settlement for the same vendor, at the same time — and paying both without checking is how the same product gets paid for twice. Worth a look whenever one vendor shows up under two arrangements. See running consignment and wholesale with the same vendor.
Where this lives in ShelfSpace
It's the AP Aging tab, first thing on the Payments page, and the same report appears under Accounting in your Data section. Every open payable is there — wholesale, non-cannabis, and consignment — bucketed by age and grouped by vendor, longest-waiting first. Expand a vendor to see the individual invoices and settlements underneath.
There's a field for the cash you have available. It never blocks a payment; it just keeps a running count against your selection so you know where you stand. When you're ready, pay a single vendor or send the whole batch at once, on the same check and ACH rails you already use. Both exports — vendor summary and line-by-line detail — go straight to your bookkeeper.
The two-minute walkthrough is above. The step-by-step is in the payments documentation.
