The Ontario provincial government requires one of the most stringent and complex retail compliance reports in all of Canada.

While most provinces require 1 document, Ontario requires 6 that all match up with each other. It’s important for cannabis retailers in Ontario to be aware of what the requirements are and the hiccups they may encounter on the way. Being prepared could be the difference between spending 1 hour or 10+ hours every month.

Supported reports
for Ontario include:

1. Federal report
2. Sales report
3. Inventory adjustments report
4. Destructions report
5. Inter-store transfer incoming report
6. Inter-store transfer outgoing report

Federal compliance report

The AGCO federal compliance report is similar to what the AGLC in Alberta requires for their jurisdiction – a line-by-line breakdown of individual cannabis SKUs provided by the wholesaler. Inventory change reasons are divided into “Quantity additions” and “Quantity reductions”, all of which your POS should track.

Things to keep in mind:

• The AGCO provides a template to copy/paste your report values into.
• It’s very important for your opening and closing inventories to line up month-to-month.
• Otherwise, the AGCO may prevent the file upload.
• The inventory $ values are based on wholesale costs, not retail prices.

OCS sales report

The OCS sales report is a unique report by the province to assess sales of every cannabis product on a day-by-day basis. This is one of the most difficult reports to work with logistically, as the number of rows explodes with your product count – for example, with just 150 active SKUs, you’re looking at a row count of 30 * 150 = 4500. It’s important that your POS can generate these reports for you to save the time in compiling this data yourself.

Things to keep in mind:

• You must give consent for the AGCO to share this data with the OCS in a dedicated spreadsheet row.
• You must record the retail price, wholesale cost, and markdowns (discounts) on a per-day basis.

Periodic discrepancy report

When you inevitably encounter inventory discrepancies, the AGCO asks that you report them on a weekly basis. In your POS, look for a feature that can help you audit (count) inventory. The difference between your “counted” and “expected” values will be the discrepancy.

Things to keep in mind:

• We recommend stores count their full store inventory at a minimum of once a week.
• Stores with more employees should strive to do full or partial counts every business day. Try to keep detailed notes for each discrepancy.

Conclusion

We’ve heard first-hand from stores on generic POS systems the difficulties of getting these reports right every month. Even when a cannabis POS provides what we call “one-click compliance reports”, they often don’t support managers for the messy mistakes that are bound to happen. Greenline POS was built to handle the realities of in-store operations, which includes:

• Typos in SKU data entry
• Duplicate products
• Not knowing why inventory is missing and more

As regulations change and evolve, Greenline is always on top of adapting our software to reflect these changes.

Greenline features full one-click reporting for your compliance needs.

To learn more about how Greenline can help your Ontario cannabis retail store, as well as for other provinces, please schedule a demo with our team.