Optimize the profitability and velocity of every SKU

Two numbers decide whether a SKU deserves its shelf space: what it nets you, and how fast it turns. Every dispensary works the second one — order tighter, merchandise better, discount smarter. The first one usually gets treated as settled, because it looks like it was decided the moment you agreed to a wholesale price.

It wasn't. A real slice of a SKU's margin is decided after the buy, in three places nobody is watching: what you actually paid versus what actually arrived, the credits your vendor owes you and nobody ever claims, and the hours your team spends moving paper to make the payment happen at all.

Those three are the whole job. Here's each one, and the video that shows it running.

1Stop paying for product that never arrived

An invoice is a claim. It's a count somebody in the vendor's office typed up: these products, these quantities, this total. Pay straight off it and you're trusting that number against boxes your team glanced at on a busy afternoon.

In cannabis you have a second record of the same delivery, and it's the one that can't be quietly edited: Metrc. Every wholesale invoice gets compared against your Metrc manifests before you can approve it for payment, line by line, and ShelfiQ tells you in plain English whether it's safe to pay — with its confidence level, not a fake green checkmark.

▶ Watch the full tutorial with transcript →

The second leak on this side is the same invoice paid twice — a copy that came in by email and again as a paper stack, a vendor who re-sent last month's statement, a delivery entered by two people. Duplicate payments get caught and held before any money moves, not found in a reconciliation three months later when the vendor has no appetite to refund it. There's a walkthrough of that in troubleshooting duplicate payments.

None of this assumes your vendor is cheating you. Deliveries are messy — a package left on the truck, a line keyed twice, the wrong manifest stapled to the invoice. You and your vendor both want to settle on what really showed up. Metrc is the shared record that settles it. More on the mechanics: how every invoice gets checked against Metrc and where dispensaries overpay vendors.

2Recover the credits you're already owed

Product comes back. Customers return it, it fails, it expires on the shelf, it gets destroyed. And every month you run promotions and markdowns that eat into margin you were counting on. A meaningful share of that is your vendor's to cover — and almost none of it gets claimed, because the evidence lives in three different systems and nobody has the hours to assemble it.

That assembly is what the credit recovery cycle does. Pull last month's returns and destruction from Metrc and your POS, price them against what you paid, and produce a clean, itemized credit memo per vendor. You review it, you send it, and the vendor approves, disputes, or goes quiet — and going quiet has a deadline. The credit then nets straight off their next check.

▶ Watch the full tutorial with transcript →

Four kinds of credit, four different sources: customer returns and waste, aging inventory you had to mark down, and promotions the vendor agreed to fund. That last one has a catch worth knowing: only a promotion your vendor approved in advance is a credit you can actually collect on. Discount first and ask later and you've simply donated the margin.

One thing to be clear about, because it trips people up: on product you took on consignment, you never bought the inventory, so a markdown is already shared through the split — the credit side there is returns and waste. The markdown and promotion credits belong to the product you bought outright.

3Take the labor out of accounts payable

The third leak doesn't show up as a line item. It shows up as somebody's week. Keying invoices, chasing a missing manifest, answering "did you get my invoice," reconciling a statement, cutting checks, filing the copies. It's the least glamorous number on this page and often the biggest.

So it gets handed off. Vendors send invoices to an address they already write to; the invoice is read, matched to the vendor and the delivery, and turned into a tracked payable without anyone typing it. ShelfiQ answers the routine vendor email — where the payment stands, what got short-paid and why, when the check went out — and escalates to a human only when it should.

▶ Watch the full tutorial with transcript →

When it's time to pay, the AP aging schedule shows everything you owe bucketed by how far past due it is, so you pick who gets paid this week against the cash you actually have — rather than paying whoever emailed loudest. See what the vendor's side of that conversation looks like in the anatomy of an AP email thread, and what it gave one team back in this time-savings case study.

Where velocity comes in

Everything above defends the margin on a SKU. Velocity is the other half, and it's mostly a question of how fast you know. Sell-through by slot — category, size and unit, so the number survives a strain rotation — tells you what to reorder before you're out and what to mark down before it ages past the point where a vendor will share the hit. A markdown taken at week six is a shared cost. The same markdown at week sixteen is yours alone. That's why the two numbers in the sentence belong together: buying on sell-through data is what keeps the aging credit small in the first place.

The sentence, in one line

Pay only for what arrived. Collect what you're owed. Stop spending a salary to do either. What's left is a SKU whose real margin you can see — and once you can see it, deciding whether it earns its shelf space stops being an argument and starts being arithmetic.

If you want to know what those three leaks are worth at your store, ask for a free evaluation. We look at your own Metrc and POS numbers and show you the size of each, before you decide anything.