Cannabis

20+ hours/week recovered and outbound nearly doubled for a single-state cannabis operator

Automated the full accounting back office across AR, AP, and a daily P&L, then rebuilt the outbound motion into a lead engine that consistently fills the sales team's calendar. The finance team stopped chasing payments and the sales team stopped building lists.

20–40 hrs/wk

Finance hours recovered

~2×

Sales call volume lift

The Company

Industry: Cannabis: cultivation, processing, and wholesale distribution
Size: Single-state operator
Geography: US, single-state regulated market

A single-state cannabis operator running cultivation, processing, and wholesale distribution. The company was growing quickly, but the back office hadn't kept up. Finance was buried in manual work, leadership was flying blind between month-end closes, and the sales team was spending more time building lists than closing deals.

The Challenge

Three problems were quietly capping growth. None of them looked urgent in isolation, but together they were costing the company hours, money, and visibility every single day.

The finance team was drowning in manual work. Invoices were being created by hand. Customer payments were being chased over email and phone. Bills were sitting in inboxes waiting on approvals. Reconciliation across the systems the team used to run the business was an end-of-week scramble that often slipped into the following week.
Leadership couldn't see the business in real time. The only reliable P&L was the one that arrived after month-end close, sometimes two to three weeks after the period had already ended. By the time leadership could see what was working and what wasn't, the month was over and the decisions that mattered had already been made on gut feel.
Sales was bottlenecked on list-building, not selling. Reps were spending hours researching prospects, hunting for contact info, and qualifying accounts before they could ever pick up the phone. The pipeline was thin, outbound activity was inconsistent, and the team's best closers were burning their best hours on work that shouldn't have been theirs to do.

The Approach

We started by mapping the operation across finance and revenue ops, finding every place a human was doing work a system should be doing, and every place data was getting re-entered instead of flowing automatically. The goal wasn't to replace any of the systems the team already trusted. It was to make those systems talk to each other, eliminate the manual entry between them, and surface the information leadership actually needed to run the business.

01
Map the manual work
Sat with finance and sales for two weeks. Documented every repetitive task, every duplicate data entry, every place a person was the integration between two systems.
02
Sequence by payback
Prioritized the builds by how much time they'd recover and how quickly. AR automation first, since that was the biggest daily drain. Then AP, then the daily P&L, then the lead engine.
03
Build, deploy, hand off
Shipped each system into production with the team using it before moving to the next. No big-bang rollout. No three-month silence followed by a launch nobody trusts.

What We Built

Four integrated systems, each running in production and feeding the next.

AR & invoicing automation

The system generates invoices automatically from sales activity, sends customer reminders on a configurable cadence, applies payments as they land, and reconciles transactions across the accounting and billing systems. The AR team stopped manually creating invoices, stopped chasing payments by hand, and stopped reconciling at the end of every week. Days sales outstanding dropped. Cash collection got predictable.

AP automation

Inbound bills are ingested automatically, routed through configurable approval workflows, and checked for duplicates and exceptions before they ever hit the payables queue. Leadership gets full visibility into what's being paid and when, without having to be in the weeds. The finance team moves faster, vendors get paid on time, and nothing slips through the cracks.

Daily P&L engine

An OCR-powered consolidation layer that pulls in bank feeds, accounting data, and inventory levels into a single executive dashboard. Leadership opens one view every morning and sees an accurate, real-time picture of the business across revenue, margin, cash position, and inventory movement, instead of waiting two to three weeks for month-end. Decisions that used to be made on instinct now get made on data, in the same week the data is relevant.

Lead generation & enrichment engine

A custom-built lead engine that automates prospect research, contact enrichment, intent signal scoring, and pipeline routing. The sales team stopped building lists and started having conversations. Outbound throughput roughly doubled. The reps spend their time on the highest-leverage activity, talking to qualified prospects, and the system handles everything that used to come before that.

The Results

20–40 hrs/wk

Finance hours recovered across AR, AP, and reporting

~2×

Sales call volume after the lead engine went live

Real-time

Daily P&L replaces the month-end wait

Soft outcomes

Finance team stopped working late and on weekends to close the books. The work that used to happen at month-end now happens continuously and quietly in the background.
Leadership stopped asking "where are we?" and started asking "what should we do next?" The data was finally in front of them every morning.
Sales reps stopped complaining about pipeline. The list-building work that used to consume mornings was gone, and the team was on the phone instead.
Duplicate bills, missed invoices, and reconciliation errors effectively disappeared. The system catches what humans miss.

The Methodology

Map the work first. Build where the payback is fastest. Then scale.

Every engagement starts with the same question: where is the largest, most measurable leak, and what's the fastest, lowest-risk system to close it? We resist the urge to redesign everything at once. The first win funds trust for the second. The second buys trust for the third.

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