Cannabis Accounting and Bookkeeping Services
Cannabis accounting is not general bookkeeping. Section 280E disallows ordinary business deductions, so the only expenses that reach your return are the ones you can defend as cost of goods sold. That turns cost accounting from a nice to have into the single largest tax decision your books make each year.
Compliance sits on top of every transaction. Your ledger has to agree with the state tracking system, your point of sale, your cash counts and your license records at the same time. When those four disagree, the gap shows up in an audit rather than in a report.
CrownGlobe provides cannabis accounting and bookkeeping to dispensaries, cultivators, manufacturers and distributors across the USA. Daily bookkeeping, cost accounting and COGS allocation, cannabis tax preparation, seed to sale reconciliation, cash handling controls and CFO level reporting, all of it remote and inside the software you already run.
Section 280E & Cost Accounting
Build inventoriable cost into the ledger as it happens, so cost of goods sold is supported by records rather than reconstructed from guesswork at filing time.
Seed to Sale Inventory
Keep units, weights and transfers in the accounting system agreeing with METRC or BioTrack, month by month, instead of discovering a variance during an inspection.
Cash Handling & Banking
Record till counts, drops, vault movements and armored pickups with a documented trail, and keep the deposit history your bank asks for to retain the account.
License & State Reporting
Track excise and sales tax, license renewals and regulator filings by entity, so each license carries its own clean set of books and its own audit file.
Service mapping for cannabis businesses
We map the CrownGlobe finance stack onto how a licensed operator actually runs. Cost centers that follow your license structure, a chart of accounts written for 280E, and inventory records that reconcile to the state system rather than sitting beside it.
One dispensary or a vertically integrated group, the reporting spine is the same. Clean books, defensible COGS, current filings, and margin numbers you can price against. You get a cannabis accountant, consultants and a controller on one team rather than three vendors who never speak.
Cannabis Bookkeeping
Reconciled books on a cannabis chart of accounts, so revenue, inventory, labor and overhead land where 280E and your license structure need them to land.
Cost Accounting & COGS
Absorption costing for cultivation, extraction and packaging, with the working papers that show how each dollar reached cost of goods sold.
Cannabis Tax & 280E Support
Cannabis tax preparation and planning through the year, including excise and sales tax, estimated payments and year end readiness for the business return.
Virtual CFO for Operators
Cash forecasting, category margin analysis, license expansion modeling and investor or lender packages, from a cannabis CFO who has seen your numbers all year. For production groups we also act as a cannabis financial consultant for manufacturers working through costing and capacity decisions.
Dashboards & Reporting
Automated feeds from your point of sale, seed to sale system and bank, reporting into dashboards that refresh with the monthly close instead of a spreadsheet.
Industry specific challenges cannabis businesses face
Accounting for cannabis businesses means solving tax and compliance problems no other retailer or manufacturer has to face, and almost all of them land on the accounting team.
Section 280E and lost deductions
Rent, marketing, most wages and almost every selling expense are disallowed. What survives is cost of goods sold, so how you classify a cost during the month decides what you can deduct at the end of the year.
Inventory costing that has to hold up
Cultivation and manufacturing costs have to be absorbed into product, not expensed as incurred. Without a costing method applied consistently and documented, the COGS figure on the return has nothing behind it.
Cash heavy operations
Large cash volumes move through the till, the vault and the armored carrier every week. Counts that are recorded loosely turn into shrinkage nobody can explain and a control gap an examiner will find.
Banking access that can disappear
Cannabis bank accounts and merchant accounts come with monitoring conditions and elevated fees. Accounts get closed over missing documentation more often than over anything a business actually did wrong.
Books that disagree with the state system
METRC or BioTrack is the legal record of what you hold. When the ledger says one thing and the tracking system says another, the difference is a compliance problem before it is an accounting one.
Excise and sales tax at several points
Cultivation tax, excise tax, state sales tax and local taxes can all apply to the same product on its way to the customer. Each has its own base, its own return and its own due date.
Multiple licenses and entities
Retail, cultivation, manufacturing and distribution often sit in separate entities for good reason. Intercompany transfers then have to be priced, recorded and eliminated, or consolidated results stop meaning anything.
Wholesale invoices that never get paid
Brands and distributors sell into dispensaries on terms and then wait. Without invoice level aging and a collections routine, dispensary credit quietly becomes the largest asset on the balance sheet and the least likely to convert.
Investor and lender reporting
Capital in this industry is expensive and cautious. Reporting packs that arrive late, or that cannot tie back to the tracking system, cost operators money on terms long before they cost them the round.
Cannabis Bookkeeping Services
Bookkeeping for cannabis industry operators, delivered on the close calendar you already run on: accurate books, defensible cost of goods sold and filings that go out on time.
Bookkeeping & Reconciliation
Daily cannabis bookkeeping with bank, cash and payment processor reconciliation, on a chart of accounts built for 280E and for the way your licenses are structured.
Cost Accounting & COGS
Direct and indirect cost allocation across cultivation, extraction, packaging and retail, with a written costing method and the working papers to support it.
Cannabis Tax Preparation
Business return preparation under Section 280E, excise and sales tax filing, estimated payments, plus cannabis tax planning and accounting advice given while there is still time to act on it.
Dispensary Credit Recovery
Invoice level aging, credit limits by account and a documented collections routine for brands and distributors carrying unpaid dispensary receivables.
Cash Handling & Banking
Till, vault and armored pickup controls, plus the deposit and source of funds documentation your cannabis bank account and merchant account depend on.
Inventory Reconciliation
Monthly reconciliation between the accounting system and METRC or BioTrack, with variances investigated and explained rather than written off quietly.
Industry Specific Benefits
A visual map of the operating gains cannabis businesses get when cash, inventory, tax and reporting stay connected.
Improved Cash Flow
Deposits, cash counts and payment processor settlements are reconciled to the ledger every week, so the cash on your dashboard is the cash in the safe and the bank.
Reduced Errors
Your point of sale, seed to sale and banking data are matched against each other, which is where miscounts, missing manifests and duplicate entries actually surface.
Time Savings
Close, inventory reconciliation and state reporting move off the owner and off the store manager, so the people running the operation spend their week running it.
Compliance Assurance
State reporting, license renewals and inventory records are kept current through the year, so an inspection or an audit finds books that already agree with the tracking system.
Actionable Insights
Gross margin by category, by store and by SKU comes out of your own books, so pricing, purchasing and expansion decisions rest on measured numbers.
Data Driven Financial Strategy
Cannabis CFO support and business intelligence built on the same ledger your cannabis company accounting already runs on.
Margin Dashboards
Live gross margin by category, brand, store and SKU, built in Power BI from your accounting data.
Cash Forecasting
Forward cash forecasts that account for excise due dates, vendor terms, harvest cycles and the 280E tax burden.
Cost Per Unit
Cultivation cost per gram and manufacturing cost per unit, fully absorbed, so wholesale pricing rests on real cost.
License Reporting
Results by license and by entity with intercompany transfers eliminated, so consolidated and single license numbers are both correct.
Expansion Planning
Investor and lender ready packages, plus modeling for a new store or an additional license with 280E already in it.
Case Study
Vertically Integrated Operator
Cost Accounting Rebuilt Around Section 280E
A vertically integrated operator running a cultivation site, a processing facility and three dispensaries was expensing most production cost as it was incurred. Cost of goods sold was assembled once a year from spreadsheets, the accounting system and the state tracking system had not been reconciled in several months, and cash counts from the stores were recorded as a single deposit line with no till level detail behind it.
CrownGlobe’s cannabis specialists rebuilt the chart of accounts by entity and license, then put an absorption costing method in place across cultivation, extraction and packaging, with written working papers showing how labor, utilities, facility cost and packaging reached each batch. Point of sale, seed to sale and banking data were connected so the three could be matched monthly, and a till to vault to deposit routine replaced the single deposit line.
The result was a reporting pack the ownership group could take to a lender and to their tax preparer without a rebuild: inventory that agreed with the state system month by month, cost of goods sold supported by contemporaneous records rather than a year end reconstruction, and margin reported by category and by store instead of averaged across the group.
Technology & Automation Solutions
We work inside the systems a licensed operator already runs, rather than asking your team to enter the same data twice.
Seed to Sale Systems
Inventory, transfer and manifest data read from state traceability systems including METRC and BioTrack, then reconciled against the ledger every month.
Cannabis POS Platforms
Accounting integrations pull sales, discount, loyalty and tax data from cannabis point of sale platforms including Dutchie, Flowhub, Treez, Blaze and Greenline.
Accounting Software
QuickBooks Online, Xero and Sage Intacct, configured with a cannabis chart of accounts, class tracking by license and inventory costing from day one.
Banking & Payments
Reconciliation support for cannabis bank accounts, credit union programs, merchant accounts and debit routing providers, including the fee structures each one applies.
Business Intelligence
Microsoft Power BI dashboards for category margin, cost per unit, inventory turns and cash position, refreshed alongside the monthly close.
Engagement Models
Standard
$125/ Per Month
Suited to a single license operator that needs accurate monthly cannabis bookkeeping, bank and cash reconciliation, inventory reconciliation to the state system and organized records for the year end return.
Growth
$195/ Per Month
Adds controller level oversight for growing operators: absorption costing and COGS allocation, excise and sales tax filing, cash handling controls, receivables management and regular category margin reporting.
Virtual CFO
$295/ Per Month
Strategic cannabis CFO support for multi license and multistate groups: forecasting, entity and intercompany reporting, cost per unit analysis, investor and lender packages, KPI dashboards and expansion planning.
FAQs
Answer: Accounting for cannabis differs from ordinary bookkeeping in two ways, and they compound. Section 280E removes almost every ordinary deduction, so the cost you push into cost of goods sold during the month is the cost you get to claim at the end of the year. And your books have to agree with a state tracking system that regulators treat as the legal record. A general bookkeeper can post the transactions accurately and still leave you with a return you cannot defend, because the structure underneath was never built for either of those. That is the whole reason a cannabis accounting firm exists as a separate thing.
Answer: Section 280E of the Internal Revenue Code denies deductions and credits for a business trafficking in a controlled substance. Cost of goods sold is not a deduction, it is a reduction of gross receipts, so it survives. In practice that means classification is everything. A cultivation worker’s wages can be inventoriable. A budtender’s wages usually are not. Two operators with identical profit can owe very different tax depending on how carefully their books made that distinction all year. Tax accounting for cannabis business owners starts in the chart of accounts, not in April.
Answer: We set a costing method, apply it consistently and document it. For cultivation that means absorbing direct labor, nutrients, growing media, utilities and an allocated share of facility cost into the plants and then into finished product. For manufacturing it means absorbing extraction labor, inputs, packaging and production overhead into each batch. For retail it is product cost plus the costs of acquiring and holding inventory. Cannabis cost accounting only works if the allocation happens during the month, which is why we build it into the close rather than the return. Cannabis inventory accounting follows the same logic: the number has to be created by the process, not reverse engineered from it.
Answer: Yes, and with distributors, delivery operators, testing labs, brands and multistate operators. We act as the cannabis accountant for dispensaries, for cultivators, for processors, for manufacturers, for distributors, for delivery companies, for brands and for MSOs. Where the engagement is mostly tax, the same list applies: we are the cannabis tax accountant for dispensaries, for cultivators, for processors, for manufacturers, for distributors, for delivery companies, for brands and for MSOs. The close calendar and the reporting pack change by license type, but the spine does not. Cannabis accounting for dispensaries is the busiest part of the practice, along with dispensary bookkeeping and the dispensary CPA relationship that usually sits beside it, and a dispensary accountant who has never reconciled to a state tracking system will miss the things that matter.
Answer: We do not open accounts for you, and nobody honest will promise that. What we do is prepare the documentation that decides whether you keep one. Operators ask us how to get a cannabis bank account, and the practical answer is that bank accounts for cannabis businesses sit at credit unions and community banks running enhanced monitoring programs. Those programs ask for deposit detail, source of funds support and license records on a set schedule. Most closures we see follow missing paperwork rather than anything the business actually did. Cannabis business bank accounts, cannabis merchant accounts and debit routing providers each carry fee structures that need reconciling every month, and a bank account for your cannabis business is only ever as safe as the file sitting behind it.
Answer: If you are a brand or a distributor selling into dispensaries on terms, some of that money does not come back on its own. Dispensary credit recovery is the work of aging those invoices properly, setting credit limits by account, matching payments to specific invoices rather than to a running balance, and escalating on a defined schedule. We build the receivables side so you can see which accounts are slipping while there is still something to collect, and we work alongside dispensary credit recovery consultants when an account has moved past what an accounting team should handle.
Answer: We work with licensed operators in every legal state, and the whole engagement is remote. People search for cannabis accounting near me, cannabis accounting services near me and cannabis accountants near me out of habit, but the work happens inside your software rather than at your desk. What matters is whether the team knows your state’s rules. We handle cannabis accounting in New York, in Philadelphia, in Baltimore, in Washington DC, in Fredericksburg, in Richmond and in Atlanta, plus Colorado cannabis accounting, Michigan cannabis accounting and the rest of the legal market.
Answer: Yes. California is the largest part of our cannabis practice, and accounting for the California cannabis industry brings its own problems: excise mechanics that have changed more than once, district taxes that differ by city, and California cannabis accounting reporting requirements that catch operators who move across county lines. Our California cannabis accountants cover CDTFA filing and local tax, and where an attest opinion is required we work alongside a cannabis CPA California licensed to sign it. We provide cannabis accounting services California operators actually need, remotely, from Los Angeles and San Diego to the Bay Area, Sacramento, Orange County, Sonoma, Santa Rosa and Chico.
Answer: QuickBooks Online, Xero and Sage Intacct, depending on how many licenses and entities you carry. There is no cannabis accounting software that does the whole job on its own, so the setup matters more than the brand: a cannabis chart of accounts that separates inventoriable cost from disallowed cost, class or tracking category by license, and an inventory module that can hold a costing method. We build that during onboarding and hand you the documentation for it.
Answer: Every month, as part of the close. Seed to sale systems hold the legal record of what you have, and the ledger holds the financial record of what it cost. When the two disagree, we chase the difference to a transfer, a manifest, a waste entry or a count error rather than plugging it. A variance you can explain is a housekeeping item. The same variance discovered during an inspection is something else entirely.
Answer: CrownGlobe is an offshore finance and accounting firm, and our cannabis accountants work alongside your CPA rather than replacing the attest relationship. If you already have a cannabis CPA, we do the daily work and hand them a clean file, which usually shortens their engagement and lowers what they bill. If you do not, we can introduce you to cannabis CPA firms we work with regularly. Cannabis accounting firms and cannabis accounting companies differ mainly in whether they can sign an opinion, so it is worth asking early. Many operators use a cannabis bookkeeper for volume and a CPA for signature, and that split works well when the file handoff is organized.
Answer: Yes, and the tax position is different, which is the part people miss. Hemp compliant with the 2018 Farm Bill is not subject to Section 280E, so accounting for a hemp business or a CBD brand looks much closer to ordinary manufacturing and retail. Deductions are available again. What stays difficult is inventory costing, testing documentation and interstate sales tax. We provide hemp accounting, CBD accounting, CBD oil accounting and CBD bookkeeping on that basis, which is the part a general CBD accounting firm tends to get wrong, and accounting for hemp business owners who also hold a cannabis license means two sets of books kept properly apart.
Answer: We do. Medical marijuana accounting carries patient registry reporting, product limits and tax treatment that often differ from the adult use market in the same state, and a medical license can sit under different ownership rules. Whether you call it medical marijuana bookkeeping, marijuana accounting, weed accounting or cannabis accounting, the close process is the same. Our marijuana accountants handle both markets, and we work with a medical marijuana CPA where a signed opinion is needed. The state reporting around it is what changes, and that is where most of the setup work goes.
Answer: Our packages start at $125 a month for a single license operator and run to $295 a month for CFO level support across multiple licenses. What moves the price is the number of entities, the number of locations, transaction volume and whether cultivation or manufacturing costing is in scope. Cannabis accountant rates quoted by the hour are common in this industry and hard to budget against, so we quote a fixed monthly fee for cannabis tax services and accounting and tell you before it changes. Cannabis business accounting should be a line you can plan around, not a surprise each quarter.
Answer: That is how a good share of our cannabis engagements start. A cannabis accounting cleanup runs as its own project before the monthly service begins: we assess how many periods are open, how much source data can still be recovered, and where the ledger and the tracking system parted company. You get a scope and a fixed price before we touch anything. Only once the history is closed and reconciled do we move you onto the ongoing package.
Answer: Yes. A fractional cannabis CFO is the usual answer for operators who need forecasting, capital conversations and board reporting but cannot carry that salary, particularly under 280E where the salary itself is often not deductible. Our Executive package covers cash forecasting, cost per unit analysis, entity and intercompany reporting, lender and investor packages and expansion modeling. It is outsourced cannabis accounting, cannabis financial consulting and cannabis financial advisory services run by people who already have their hands in your ledger every week.
Get your cannabis books audit ready
Licensed operators run better when cost of goods sold is built during the month, inventory agrees with the state system, and margin is a number you can price against. Book a free consultation and we will walk through your current setup, where the 280E exposure sits, and what a cannabis specific finance stack would look like for your licenses.