The Setup
A two-location dispensary was processing 80+ vendor invoices per month. Staff checked the vendor name and the total — that was it. Nobody was comparing line items against what actually came through the door. If a vendor said 50 units at $12, that's what got paid.
They'd been doing this for years. No one questioned the numbers because no one had the time to check them.
What We Caught
In the first 30 days, we matched every incoming invoice against Metrc delivery records — manifest by manifest, line item by line item. 12 invoices didn't match.
The discrepancies:
- 4 invoices billed for more units than Metrc showed received (quantity mismatches)
- 3 invoices had per-unit prices that didn't match the agreed rate on the delivery manifest
- 2 invoices included items that weren't on the Metrc manifest at all
- 2 invoices billed the wrong location for a delivery received at the other store
- 1 invoice was a straight duplicate of one paid the prior week
Total overpayment prevented: $7,340. That's 15% of invoices with errors in a single month.
How We Caught It
We pull delivery data directly from Metrc. When an invoice comes in — uploaded or emailed — ShelfiQ parses it and we match every line item against the corresponding Metrc delivery. Quantities, unit costs, package IDs, receiving location. If something doesn't match, it gets flagged before payment is approved.
This isn't sampling. It's every invoice, every line item, every time. The invoice verification process runs on every payment before a check goes out.
The errors weren't malicious — vendors make mistakes too. Quantities get transposed. Prices don't get updated after a negotiation. Deliveries get logged to the wrong store. These are normal mistakes that become real money when nobody's checking.
The Result
$7,340 saved in month one. 12 out of roughly 80 invoices had errors — a 15% error rate. None of these would have been caught by someone glancing at the total. The dispensary had been paying unverified invoices for years.
Extrapolated across a full year, the same error rate would cost them over $88,000. And that's before factoring in the compounding effect — once vendors know invoices get checked, error rates tend to drop.
15% of their invoices were wrong. They'd been paying every one of them.
If your team is paying invoices without matching them to Metrc deliveries, you're overpaying. The only question is how much. Talk to us — we'll run a free evaluation on your last 90 days of invoices and show you what we find.