The Setup
A single-location Massachusetts dispensary doing about $2.5M a year. Solid operation. Good team. Margins looked healthy at first glance — actual margin was running 55.4% against a 57% target. A 1.6-point gap. Not exactly a fire alarm.
Except that 1.6-point gap, spread across every sale, every vendor, every week — adds up to a lot of money nobody was collecting.
Actual margin
55.4%
What the dispensary was actually earning, every sale, every vendor, every week.
Target margin
57%
The margin the vendor agreements were built around. The 1.6-point gap was a co-marketing credit nobody collected.
The dispensary wasn't doing anything wrong. They were running promotions, pricing competitively, moving product. But nobody was going back to vendors and saying: you owe us for that.
What We Found
We connected to their Metrc account — read-only, took about five minutes — and analyzed 90 days of sales data against wholesale costs. Every product, every vendor, every transaction.
$211,873 in annualized co-marketing credit opportunities. That's the gross number. Ten out of twelve vendors had products selling below the target margin. The average vendor margin was 47.7% — almost ten points below the 57% target.
The credits were sitting there in the data. Products discounted for promotions. Competitive pricing below keystone. Aging markdowns. In every case, the vendor's co-marketing agreement covered the difference — but nobody had ever calculated it or sent a credit memo.
On the waste side, we found 19 waste events across 11 vendors — returns, damaged product, expirations. Small dollar amounts individually, but they add up. And more importantly, they signal a pattern: once we start tracking waste credits systematically, that number grows as the operations team gets better at logging events.
How We Found It
The entire analysis runs on Metrc data. We pull every sale, every delivery, every waste event. Then we cross-reference:
- Sale price vs. wholesale cost — for every product, every transaction. When the actual margin dips below the vendor's target margin, that gap is a co-marketing credit.
- Waste events vs. vendor agreements — returns, expirations, and destroyed product. If the vendor agreement covers waste, we generate the credit memo.
- Vendor-by-vendor breakdown — not a single aggregate number. We show exactly which vendors owe what, backed by line-item data from Metrc.
Compare sale price vs. wholesale cost
For every product, every transaction. When the actual margin dips below the vendor's target margin, that gap is a co-marketing credit.
Match waste events vs. vendor agreements
Returns, expirations, and destroyed product. If the vendor agreement covers waste, we generate the credit memo.
Build the vendor-by-vendor memo
Specific products, dates, margin shortfalls, and dollar amounts, backed by line-item Metrc data. That's why vendors approve them.
We don't estimate. We calculate. Every credit memo we send to a vendor has the specific products, specific dates, specific margin shortfalls, and specific dollar amounts. That's why vendors approve them — there's nothing to argue with.
The credit memos go to vendors for review. They can approve, or open a discussion if a line doesn't sit right. ShelfiQ follows up every few business days and answers basic questions; when a vendor pushes back on a specific line, the thread escalates to the retailer's AP person or buyer. Most approve outright — vendors budget for co-marketing and expect to pay it. They just need someone to actually ask.
The Result
Year 1 estimate at a conservative 40% vendor approval rate: $83,741 in recovered credits.
That's $6,978 per month going straight to the bottom line. Same revenue. Same overhead. Same staff. The only thing that changed is someone finally tracked what the dispensary was owed and collected it.
Same revenue. Same overhead. Same staff. Just money that was always theirs, sitting in vendor agreements nobody was reading.
On a ~$386,000 EBITDA base, that's a 15% improvement in EBITDA — from credit recovery alone. No new customers. No cost cuts. No layoffs. Just money that was always theirs, sitting in vendor agreements nobody was reading.
As vendor relationships mature and approval rates climb toward 65-85%, the recovery grows toward $137,000-$179,000 per year. The 15% EBITDA improvement is the floor, not the ceiling.
84% of their vendor relationships had recoverable credits. Nobody had ever sent a single credit memo.
This is one dispensary. One location. $2.5M in revenue. The math scales with the operation — more vendors, more volume, more credits waiting to be collected.
Want to see what's hiding at your stores? View the full sample evaluation report — or get your own, free. For a line-by-line tour of the monthly credit memo we'd send to each of your vendors, read Anatomy of a vendor credit memo.
