A Chart of Accounts Built for 280E
The chart of accounts is the tax strategy. Every cost account is designated at setup as inventoriable or non-inventoriable, and production costs are further segmented by function so allocations can be supported later. Departments or classes track activity by location, license and business line.
Done correctly, the trial balance itself produces the COGS computation. Done poorly, someone reconstructs it from memory in March, and the reconstruction is exactly what an examiner will dismantle.
- Inventoriable versus period cost designation at the account level
- Departmental tracking by license, location and function
- Separate treatment of plant-touching and non-plant-touching activity
- Consistent vendor and item mapping to keep costing stable
The Monthly Close
We run a fixed close calendar with a documented checklist: bank and cash reconciliation including vault counts, POS or invoice revenue tie-out, inventory rollforward and reconciliation to track-and-trace, accrual and prepaid schedules, payroll reconciliation to filed returns, intercompany elimination, and a variance review against budget and prior period.
The deliverable is a package, not a file: statements, key metrics, the variance narrative and the open-items list with owners and dates.
Cash-Intensive Business Discipline
Where currency is involved, bookkeeping quality is a defense. Daily cash logs, dual counts, over/short tracking, documented deposits and a vault reconciliation that ties to the ledger create the record that shows income was fully reported.
We also keep the documentation that cannabis-compliant financial institutions require, so a banking relationship is not lost over a reporting request the operator cannot fill.
Cleanup and Catch-Up Engagements
Many operators come to us with years of untouched or unreliable books. Cleanup follows a sequence: establish an inventory baseline, rebuild the chart of accounts, reconstruct bank and cash activity, rebuild inventory rollforwards from track-and-trace and purchase records, then re-close each period forward.
We scope cleanup explicitly with a fixed sequence and a defined endpoint so it does not become an indefinite project.
Systems and Workflow
We implement accounting platforms, seed-to-sale integrations, POS connections, AP workflow and document management appropriate to the operator's size, and we write the procedures down. Documented workflow survives staff turnover, which in cannabis is frequent.
Where a client keeps bookkeeping in house, we supervise: we design the system, review the close, and own the technical positions while the internal team does the daily work.
