Same vendor. Two payment modes.

Most dispensary operators I talk to treat a vendor relationship like a binary. Either the brand is on wholesale — you place orders, you cut checks, you eat the loss if it doesn't sell — or the brand is on consignment, where the vendor keeps ownership until the customer rings the register and you pay only for what moved. Pick one. Pick a side. Pick a payment mode for the entire vendor.

That binary is doing a lot of you harm. Real vendor relationships aren't one mode; they're a portfolio of SKUs with different risk profiles. A vendor's flagship pre-roll that turns weekly belongs on different terms than their experimental infused-flower drop that may or may not move. You should be able to buy the flagship wholesale at a sharp price and consign the experimental drop so you don't eat the loss if it sits. Same brand. Two relationships. Two payment modes.

In ShelfSpace, that's exactly how it works. The vendor is one record. The delivery is what carries the mode — and you designate it at the dock, every time, with a single button click.

Two modes, side by side

The vendor record in ShelfSpace has two settings panels stacked on one page. The Wholesale Settings panel holds your AP terms — payment terms (COD, Net 30, Net 60), discount discipline, and the rest of the invoice machinery. The Consignment Settings panel holds your profit-split arrangement — the master split, the operational discount cap, the per-category splits. If you only have one kind of relationship with a vendor, the other panel sits empty. Most relationships start that way and grow into both panels over time.

Above is what a vendor looks like in ShelfSpace when they're consignment-only — flagship product still moving through the door on a different vendor's wholesale terms, this one fully configured for consignment from day one. When the relationship grows and you and the vendor agree to wholesale some of their SKUs too, the left panel fills in. Same record, no re-onboarding, no separate "consignment vendor" account.

The differentiator is one button at the dock

When the truck arrives, you create the delivery in the platform. The Create Delivery form has the usual fields — vendor, invoice number, delivery date, package count, dollar total — but the load-bearing field is the one in the middle: Order Type, a two-button toggle. Wholesale or Consignment. Pick one.

That click is the entire downstream branch. A consignment-tagged delivery feeds the weekly settlement engine: every SKU on it gets tracked individually, every POS sale of those SKUs rolls up into the next vendor settlement, and at the end of the week the platform calculates the vendor's payout based on what actually moved. A wholesale-tagged delivery feeds AP: the invoice lands in the payables queue, the platform three-way-matches it against the PO and the Metrc manifest, and you cut a check on whatever terms you and the vendor agreed to.

One vendor can do both. If they want to ship you a wholesale order and a consignment order on the same trip, they bring two invoices and two Metrc manifests — one for each. You create two deliveries in ShelfSpace, designating one Wholesale and one Consignment. The driver hands you both stacks of paper. The two-manifest discipline isn't just a platform constraint; it's a Metrc chain-of-custody discipline. Mixing modes on one manifest creates an audit answer you don't want to give.

Receiving is the same, whichever mode

The Receive flow at the dock is identical between the two modes. Three steps inside the Receive dialog: upload the signed paper invoice and the Metrc manifest, confirm what physically arrived (mark Received, Short, Damaged, or Not Compliant for each line), and confirm the dollar total on the screen matches the signed paper invoice. The platform doesn't care whether the delivery is wholesale or consignment for receiving — the dialog renders the same. What changes is where the delivery goes next.

For the literal click-by-click walkthrough of the Receive flow — upload screens, the line-item disposition picker, the invoice-total confirmation — see the full step-by-step in our docs. The doc has the screenshots and the operator SOP version of every step.

Payday: two paths to resolved

When a consignment settlement is ready, it lands in Payments → Consignment Payments with the settlement report attached. Net payout, period dates, the works. Check the box, click into the row, and the detail page presents two paths.

Approve & Pay is the one-click path. The platform cuts a Check 21 from your bank to the vendor, syncs the bill and the payment to QuickBooks, posts the check to the vendor portal, and emails the vendor a multi-page settlement report ending with the printable check. The check is Check 21 compliant — the vendor can mobile-deposit it through any bank app, take it to a teller, or run it through a desktop check scanner.

Mark as paid externally is the path for retailers who'd rather route the payment themselves — through their bank's bill-pay, an ACH from accounting, or a paper check off-platform. The tooltip on the button reads: "Record an external payment (your own check / ACH / cash). ShelfSpace will not cut a check or charge a check fee." The platform records the resolution; the vendor receives the same settlement report, except the last page shows a "PAID EXTERNALLY" stamp instead of a check.

Either path on the consignment side produces the same vendor experience downstream: the vendor sees the same Settlement Summary, Sales Detail, Margin Analysis, Waste & Credits, and Remaining Inventory pages on the same PDF. The only difference is whether page six is a Check 21 check or a "PAID EXTERNALLY" stamp. Same record, same numbers, same transparency. The difference is who routes the dollars.

Why this matters for vendor relationships

Vendors who'll only sell you wholesale are vendors who don't trust your sell-through. Vendors who'll only sell you consignment are vendors who can't afford the working capital risk of net-30 terms. The vendors you most want to work with — the brands building real businesses — sit in the middle. They want to test new SKUs on your shelf without writing off the loss. They want their flagship on competitive wholesale terms because they trust their flagship.

When you can offer both modes from the same vendor record, the conversation gets easier. "Let's wholesale the flagship and consign the new line for the first 90 days" is a real proposal you can make and execute, not a hypothetical that breaks because your accounting system can't tell the two apart. Reciprocal buying between vertically integrated companies, brand experimentation, slow-moving long-tail SKUs, new product launches — all of these benefit from the two-mode option living inside one vendor relationship instead of forcing a binary choice.

If you're earlier in the journey and you're still working through which vendors to convert to consignment in the first place, the getting-started guide walks the upstream conversation. If you want the page-by-page settlement-report walkthrough — the cover, the sales detail, the margin true-up — see Anatomy of a Consignment Settlement Report. And if you want to see the literal click-by-click of every screen above, the operator SOP doc has the screenshots. One more thing the two-mode relationship unlocks: a promotion you pre-approve with the vendor protects your margin on both sides — a co-marketing credit on the wholesale units, a bigger discount budget on the consignment units — which we cover in why advance vendor approval improves your margins.

Consignment and wholesale aren't competing strategies. They're different tools for different SKUs. The platform should let you pick the right one per delivery, not force the decision at the vendor level.

Ready to run consignment without rewriting receiving? Reach out and I'll walk you through what the first 60 days look like for your specific operation.