Consignment is a beautiful deal right up until a state examiner asks the one question the whole model rests on: you received this product on consignment — show me where every unit went. Some sold. Some came back. Some expired and got destroyed. Some is still sitting on the shelf. For a single invoice, you can piece that together from a POS export and a Metrc report in an afternoon. For a year of invoices, on demand, in front of an auditor, it's the reason a lot of stores quietly avoid consignment altogether.
It shouldn't be. The data to answer that question already exists — every sale is tagged, every destruction is logged in Metrc, every received unit came in on an invoice. What's missing is the one screen that adds it all up per invoice. That's the Invoice Payoff tab, and this post is a plain walkthrough of what it shows and why it matters to both sides of a consignment relationship.
The question, answered in one row per invoice
Open the Data page in the portal, switch the view to Consignment, and click the Invoice Payoff tab. Every consignment invoice you've received is a row. The columns walk the product through its entire life on the shelf — in the invoice's own unit of measure, grams for flower and eaches for packaged goods, never mixing the two.
| Invoice | Received | Sold | Returned | Destroyed | Remaining | Recon Δ | Status |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| INV-4471 | 120 | 120 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 | Closed |
| INV-4488 | 200 | 146 | 2 | 4 | 48 | 0 | Partial |
| INV-4502 | 90 | 61 | 0 | 0 | 22 | 7 | Open |
Read INV-4488: 200 units received, 146 sold, 2 returned by customers, 4 destroyed (waste or expired, straight from Metrc), and 48 still on the shelf. Add those up and you're back to 200. The Reconciliation Δ — received minus everything accounted for minus what's on hand — is zero. Every unit is explained. The invoice reads Partial, because there's still product selling through; it will close itself when the last 48 sell.
Now read INV-4502: the delta is 7. Seven units aren't explained by anything the platform can see. That row is Open, and it tells you in plain language why — maybe a package's data couldn't be verified, maybe the delivery hasn't finished being designated as consignment, maybe a count genuinely doesn't add up and someone needs to look. That's the row you want to catch now, not the day an examiner is standing at the counter.
Sold, returned, destroyed, remaining — where each number comes from
- Sold is every register sale matched back to this invoice by the Metrc package tag the product carries. If a store re-tagged a package into a new tag before it sold, those sales roll back up to the invoice they came from — relabeling never makes product look like it vanished.
- Returned is customer returns of product from this invoice.
- Destroyed comes from Metrc, not a text box — waste and expired or spoiled product that was destroyed and recorded in the state's compliance system. It's pulled verbatim, so it reconciles against the same ledger an auditor would pull.
- Remaining is what's still on the shelf from this invoice, cross-checked against your live Metrc inventory.
Open any row and you get the same five columns per package — every Metrc tag on the invoice with its own received / sold / returned / destroyed / remaining line. That's how you find the single package that isn't reconciling instead of squinting at an invoice-level total.
A reconciliation that always balances perfectly isn't trustworthy. One that tells you exactly which units still need explaining is.
Why it's honest about what it doesn't know
The easy way to build a reconciliation report is to make it always foot to zero — quietly drop anything that doesn't fit. That's also the useless way, because the first time it hides a real discrepancy, it's worse than no report at all. The Invoice Payoff tab does the opposite: anything it can't verify shows up as unexplained, and the invoice stays Open with the reason spelled out. A fresh inventory sync, a delivery still being designated, a genuine miscount — you can tell which is which, and you deal with the one that's real.
What it means for retailers
This is your consignment audit defense, standing by before anyone asks for it. Several states require dispensaries to reconcile consignment inventory on demand — prove that everything received on consignment was sold, returned, destroyed under compliance, or is physically present. Built by hand from exports, that's a multi-day scramble. Here it's a screen you open in front of the examiner and a PDF you slide across the table.
Day to day, it's also how you know a consignment invoice is genuinely finished. Closed means you've accounted for everything you owe the vendor for, with nothing left hanging — no forgotten units, no phantom shelf inventory, no surprise months later. And when something doesn't reconcile, you find it while the product and the paperwork are still fresh.
What it means for vendors
Consignment is supposed to come with transparency and usually doesn't. You shipped product you still own; you should be able to see exactly how much of each invoice has sold, how much is still on a given retailer's shelf, and how much was returned or destroyed — without emailing anyone and waiting. The vendor view shows your own invoices across every retailer you consign to, with the same received / sold / remaining detail the retailer sees.
That turns a guessing game into a decision. Watch an invoice move toward Closed and you know the store is selling through — time to send more. See units parked in Remaining for weeks and you know to ask about placement or price before more product ships. Both sides are reading the same numbers, which is exactly what keeps a consignment relationship from dying at "your numbers don't match mine."
The PDF, and the fact that you feed it nothing
One button in the top corner exports an audit-ready reconciliation: an invoice-by-invoice summary, a per-package appendix behind each invoice, and any unexplained units clearly flagged. The numbers on the PDF are the exact numbers on the screen — page and export are generated from the same source, so they can't disagree.
And you do nothing to feed any of it. As product moves, the platform is already matching every sale to its Metrc package tag, watching inventory snapshots, and pulling destruction from the compliance record. The Invoice Payoff tab just rolls all of that up to the invoice each package arrived on. The only manual step is upstream: receive the delivery as Consignment at the dock, which you were doing anyway.
If you're running consignment on a spreadsheet, this is the reconciliation you've been reconstructing by hand every time someone asks. If you're thinking about running consignment and the audit question is what's holding you back — this is the answer to it. Start with a free evaluation, or read the Invoice Payoff documentation for the field-by-field detail.
