In an industry fraught with many obstacles, compliance remains one of the biggest challenges facing cannabis businesses. Some cannabis companies run into compliance issues from not making it a priority and central focus of the business. At the same time, others struggle to keep up with rapid changes that can unfold within the government’s regulation of cannabis products.
So, how can a cannabis operation avoid noncompliance and committing costly mistakes?
Emphasize compliance in every corner of your business
Company culture starts at the top and filters down to the rest of an organization, so you need to ensure the message you convey is heard at every level. One of the keys to instituting compliance protections for cannabis businesses is ensuring that compliance is made a top priority across all departments.
Often, compliance may be emphasized at the top of an organization’s structure, but the message of how vital compliance is gets lost as it trickles down to the workforce. Everyone in the organization must recognize that cannabis compliance is a core job task for each and every person working within the business.
Standardize your tasks and procedures
Some cannabis operations take a relaxed approach to how processes are controlled, and this can create significant problems for companies as they grow.
Allowing for too much variation in compliance processes result in adaptations that can open the company to lost revenue due to inefficient practices, but also potentially major compliance mistakes. By installing standard procedures, you eliminate these potential problems.
Not only can you prescribe the correct procedures to ensure that you remain in compliance, but you can then also ensure that the ways your staff members perform their jobs are the most efficient and cost-effective practices available.
When the inspector comes…
All cannabis operations are subject to scrutiny at some point. The simple truth about the cannabis industry is that there are some government bodies or individual personalities within them that either outright resent cannabis companies or recognize the potential to siphon off cannabis dollars by way of steep fines and penalties.
Inspection is inevitable, which is why your operation needs to make compliance a top priority and install standardized practices and procedures now.
Significant fines are not the only risk associated with inspection of your operation. While penalties applied to your operation by government agencies can be massive—and in some cases can even force businesses to buckle under the costs—other problems can be just as damaging.
For instance, if your production process is not standardized for a particular product and an inspector finds discrepancies, you might be forced to perform a full recall of all of those products.
The result is a tremendous cost of the recall itself, but also the damage it can do to your brand, vendors, and consumers. Vendors are less likely to stock products from a brand with recalled goods in the past, and consumers can’t be expected to stick around waiting for you to achieve compliance.
The tremendous complexity of cannabis compliance is impossible to keep straight without modern technology, especially considering how often cannabis compliance regulations change. Cannabis accounting software turns the compliance challenge into an automated afterthought.
The right cannabis industry business software offers tools to help you to reach compliance and avoid costly mistakes. Contact us to find out which of our cannabis accounting solutions is the right fit for you.
