One wholesaler, one paper trail worth keeping clean
Buying from a single legal supplier should make the bookkeeping simple, and it almost does. Every purchase order goes to the Ontario Cannabis Store, every invoice arrives with federal excise duty already paid by the producer and baked into your unit cost, and your gross margin is effectively decided the moment the order confirms. What the single-wholesaler model actually demands is precision: we post OCS invoices at landed cost by SKU, match them to the receiving counts entered in your POS, and flag shorted or damaged cases while a credit claim is still realistic. Inventory is usually the largest number on a store's balance sheet, and it has to be right product by product, not just in total.
Month-end here is also a federal filing
Licensed retailers report to Health Canada every month through the Cannabis Tracking System: opening inventory, what came in from the OCS, what was sold, what was destroyed and what went missing. Those figures come out of the POS, and the same POS feeds your financial statements, so the ledger and the federal report should never tell different stories. We close the books to the same cut-off the tracking report uses, reconcile units and dollars between the two, and keep the working papers, because the AGCO can inspect the store's records and its Registrar's Standards assume you can produce them. A store whose accounting close and compliance report are built from one reconciled dataset spends minutes on this. A store running them separately spends days, and still risks a mismatch.
Cash, debit and the cost of being a cannabis merchant
Banking is harder in this sector than the storefront suggests. Accounts can take longer to open, some processors decline the category outright, and the ones that accept it tend to charge more. Cash still moves through the till every day, which means floats, shift counts, over-and-short tracking and deposit runs that need a control around them. Our bookkeeping treats this as a first-class problem:
- Daily settlement matching. POS batch totals tied to merchant deposits, with processor fees pulled out as their own expense line so you see what card acceptance really costs you.
- Cash over/short by shift. Small, visible and investigated while memories are fresh, not discovered at year-end.
- Deposit discipline. Every deposit traceable to the day it earned, which is exactly what a lender or an AGCO inspector wants to see.
Shrink: count it before two regulators do
Missing inventory in this business is never just a cost. Losses show up in the monthly federal report, the AGCO expects secure storage and records that explain them, and the CRA will only accept a write-off that is documented. We set a cycle-count rhythm by category, book variances monthly rather than letting them pile into a year-end surprise, and keep the destruction and loss records consistent across the POS, the tracking report and the ledger. If a break-in or a staff theft ever forces a large write-off, the paper trail already exists, which is what keeps the deduction safe and the licence conversation short. Our CRA Audit & Review Support exists for the day anyone asks.
| Record | Who reads it |
|---|---|
| POS sales and inventory movement | You daily; the AGCO on inspection |
| Cannabis Tracking System report | Health Canada, every month |
| HST return | The CRA: 13% collected, ITCs claimed |
| Bank and merchant settlements | Your bank, and any lender you approach |
| The general ledger | All of the above, reconciled to each |
What End-to-End Accounting covers for a store
Our End-to-End Accounting service puts bookkeeping, payroll, reporting and tax filing under one roof. For a cannabis retailer that means the POS summaries from systems like Cova or Greenline posted into QuickBooks Online, payroll with T4s for your CannSell-certified staff and licensed manager, quarterly or monthly HST returns claiming full input tax credits on rent, security and build-out costs, and monthly statements that split cannabis margin from accessories margin so you can see which one is moving. When the numbers are ready for bigger decisions, our Fractional CFO work picks up where the close ends. Fixed quote in writing after a free 15-minute discovery call, from our Mississauga office to stores across the GTA.
