Why Metrc Means Your Grow Must Get Off Pen & Paper
Cannabis cultivation has been both an art and a science since long before legalization. Lighting, humidity, nutrients, strains, insects, fungi, soil, flowering cycles, and so many other factors occupy the mind of a grower, whether they have one plant or five hundred. These days, there is a new variable to keep track of — compliance. The recreational market has only been open for seven years, following 73 years of prohibition — and so we have the opportunity to use twenty-first century technology to build efficiency, quality, and openness from scratch.
Unfortunately, METRC is a time sink for business owners. Tagging every plant and reporting every single move, cycle, and harvest costs labor hours and, worse, is error prone. In a political environment still resistant to even allowing cannabusinesses to make standard tax deductions, compliance can be ruthless. Missing or duplicated data can get you fined or shuttered.
Flowhub began with a retail application designed to place guardrails around a dispensary’s day-to-day business, keeping stores compliant and giving them a single place to track their inventory. Growers work with METRC as well, however, so we saw a need to be fulfilled. Right now, the cultivation industry is run almost entirely manually. State-mandated METRC tags have barcodes, but without an integrated software platform, growers have been forced to walk around with clipboards, writing down numbers by hand and uploading them into METRC via spreadsheets.
As a grower operating on pen and paper, why should you adopt an automation platform? Just like a driver considering the soon to be possible switch to a self-navigating car, the system is too new to be successful with only moderate improvements. It must be at least ten times better than the alternative — dependable enough to assuage fears over control and the unknown. Sure, pen and paper takes time, but you can look at it, hold it. You know where your spreadsheets are on your computer. Making that switch to software is a leap of faith!
Something better must be possible.
You need a way to scan your tags, a single-push option to send data to METRC, and a way to keep track of your employees’ actions along the way! You need time stamped activity logs, multiple licenses managed in one place, consistent data on losses. You need to know what is happening to your plants. Taking experience from building a revolutionary dispensary point of sale system, we have designed the Flowhub Grow application to do all this and more. Modern software development techniques have resulted in zero down time since release, a single-click onboarding process, and a platform that can continue to be built with more features and customizability.
Not convinced yet? Reach out below for a demo of Flowhub Retail and Grow!
