The Setup
A multi-location dispensary was doing delivery reconciliation the way most dispensaries do it: a shared Google Sheet. 200+ rows. Updated by hand every time a delivery came in. One column for vendor, one for date, one for what was ordered, one for what arrived, one for notes. The receiving team was supposed to fill it in after every delivery. Sometimes they did. Sometimes they didn't. Sometimes they filled in the wrong row.
The AP person would cross-reference invoices against the spreadsheet before paying. But the spreadsheet was always out of date. Rows got accidentally deleted. Data conflicted with what Metrc showed. The team spent more time arguing about whether the spreadsheet was right than actually catching discrepancies.
Nobody trusted the numbers. So in practice, most invoices got paid based on trust — "the vendor says we owe $4,200, that sounds about right, send the check."
What Changed
We connected ShelfSpace to the dispensary's Metrc account and pulled every delivery into the dashboard — real-time, direct from the state tracking system. Every package ID, every quantity, every vendor, every manifest, every transfer date. Not entered by hand. Not dependent on someone remembering to update a row.
When an invoice arrives, ShelfSpace matches it against the Metrc delivery data line-by-line. Package received? Check. Quantity matches manifest? Check. Invoice amount matches what was delivered? Check. Any discrepancy — short delivery, wrong quantity, missing packages — surfaces instantly with the exact Metrc data to back it up.
No spreadsheet. No manual cross-referencing. No "I think we received that, let me check."
Learn more about managed accounts payable.
What the Dashboard Caught
In the first 14 days, the dashboard flagged 3 delivery shortages across 2 vendors:
- A vendor delivered 47 units but invoiced for 50 — 3 units missing. The Metrc manifest confirmed 47 received.
- A second delivery was short by 5 units — the invoice matched the original order, not what actually arrived.
- A third delivery included a substituted SKU at a higher price point than what was ordered.
Total: 11 units that would have been paid for but never received. At an average unit cost of $45, that's roughly $495 in 14 days — or about $12,000 annualized across all vendors.
The old spreadsheet had none of these flagged. The receiving team had noted one of the three shortages in the spreadsheet, but it was in a "notes" column nobody checked before paying invoices.
Read more: why dispensaries overpay vendors.
Why Spreadsheets Fail at This
Three reasons:
- Manual entry is unreliable. Receiving staff are busy. They're checking in product, stocking shelves, and helping customers. Updating a spreadsheet is the lowest priority task on delivery day.
- Spreadsheets don't talk to Metrc. The state-mandated tracking system has the ground truth of what was delivered. A spreadsheet only knows what someone typed into it.
- Nobody audits before payment. Even when the spreadsheet has discrepancies noted, the AP person often doesn't check it — because they've learned not to trust it. The invoice gets paid, the discrepancy gets forgotten.
The delivery dashboard eliminates all three problems. Metrc IS the source of truth. The data enters itself. And the discrepancy is surfaced at the moment of invoice verification — not buried in row 147 of a spreadsheet.
The Result
200-row spreadsheet — zero. 3 shortages caught in 14 days. ~$12,000/year in shorted deliveries that would have been paid in full.
But the bigger result is trust. The AP person now trusts the data because it comes from Metrc, not from someone's memory. The receiving team no longer wastes time on a spreadsheet they know nobody reads. And the dispensary pays for what it actually received — not what the vendor says it shipped.
The spreadsheet was always wrong. Metrc is never wrong. We just connected the two.
If your team is still reconciling deliveries in a spreadsheet, it's costing you more than time. Talk to us — we'll show you what Metrc-powered delivery verification looks like in practice.