Daily Routine
Post the sales journal from the point-of-sale system with discounts, refunds and voids shown separately. Count and log cash at every custody transfer with two signatures. Reconcile the deposit to the sales record and document any over or short.
Receive inventory the day it arrives, matching the transfer manifest, the invoice and the physical count before the product goes on the shelf or into the vault.
Weekly Routine
Reconcile bank activity, review the accounts payable aging and schedule payments against the cash forecast, review the accounts receivable aging and escalate past-due balances, and run cycle counts on the scheduled SKU group.
Weekly cadence prevents the month-end scramble where errors are found too late to investigate properly.
- Bank reconciliation and cash position update
- AP aging review and payment scheduling
- AR aging review and collections follow-up
- Scheduled cycle counts with variance documentation
Month-End Checklist
Complete the inventory rollforward and reconcile it to physical counts and track-and-trace. Record accruals and prepaids. Reconcile payroll to filed returns. Eliminate intercompany activity. Review the trial balance account by account against prior period.
Finish with a written variance narrative. If a number moved materially and nobody can explain why, the close is not finished.
Documentation Standards
Every entry should have support attached: invoice, manifest, count sheet, payroll register or signed memo. Store documents where they can be retrieved by period and by vendor years later.
The test is simple — could a new accountant, or an examiner, reconstruct your reasoning from the file alone?
Common Bookkeeping Errors in Cannabis
Recurring problems include coding inventoriable costs to expense accounts, recording deposits as revenue rather than tying revenue to the sales journal, netting discounts against gross sales, ignoring waste and samples, and letting excise tax collected sit in a revenue account rather than a liability.
Each of these distorts both the tax position and the operating picture, and each is straightforward to prevent with structure.
