Introducing Stash™: The Mobile Way to Manage Dispensary Inventory

Hundreds, if not thousands of products and SKU’s come and go through your dispensary every month. Most traditional inventory management software is not designed to handle the level of detail that is required for proper cannabis inventory tracking. Many cannabis retailers are left to track their inventory by either piecing together several workflows and tools or manually tracking and performing audits with pen and paper or spreadsheets. Not only are these methods a time suck, but they also create leakages for compliance risk, human error, and internal theft.

_{That’s why we're excited to launch the Stash App™, a simple mobile inventory management solution custom-built for highly efficient cannabis operations.}

What is the Stash App?

The Stash App™ is one intuitive mobile application designed to streamline your back of house dispensary operations, maximize efficiency, and reduce inventory management cycles—all without being tied to a computer.

Stash helps inventory managers save time on manual, repeatable tasks and streamline daily workflows with confidence, accuracy, and compliance. From auditing your inventory top to bottom, transferring items between your store locations, and moving items within your dispensary, the Stash app enables your team to perform critical tasks all at lightning speed, and from the palm of your hand using the Nug mobile scanner device.

Stash integrates seamlessly, connecting your data from check in and dispensary point of sale to back of house operations and compliance reporting as a central record of truth across all your dispensary locations.

Hear it from Green Dragon, a cannabis enterprise based in Colorado with 12 dispensary locations, two cultivations, and two MIPs managing thousands SKU’s from their central inventory distribution hub.Inventory Manager Sam said what used to take 45 minutes to an hour, now takes 5 minutes with the Stash App:

So, what’s new?

We have been covering your inventory management needs with our Audit and Transfer mobile applications. We are always striving for innovation and to make our products better. After extensive feedback from our dispensary customers about their biggest inventory workflow challenges, we created the Stash app which consolidates our separate legacy mobile apps into one centralized inventory management “hub”, rebuilt with a brand new backend architecture, faster performance, and added functionality.

The entire app experience has been optimized to give your staff more mobility and more visibility into your inventory movement than ever before. Whether you're a boutique or growing enterprise, you can now combine POS, inventory management, API integrations and reporting capabilities on desktop with the Nug's Greet and Stash app on mobile for a reliable, compliant platform that works the way you do. 

What are the features and benefits of Stash?

Managing a dispensary is not a desk job. Your day to day tasks are dynamic, and your staff moves around physically just as much as your inventory does. With the Stash App, lugging around bulky hardware is a thing of the past.The Stash app comes preloaded on the mobile Nug scanner with three primary functions:

• Audit Inventory
  
• Transfer Between Locations
• Move Between Rooms

Mobile inventory audits

Audits are a necessary evil in any retail environment. They are designed to closely track the most valuable asset in your store: your inventory. However, audits for dispensaries are a little more complicated. It is not only essential to regularly audit your physical inventory to protect and maximize your bottom line, but regulatory bodies require total transparency, visibility, and accuracy of your inventory in order to stay in compliance.In order to maintain compliance, inventory counts must match across three operational systems:

• Physical inventory
• Point-of-sale inventory
• Metrc Track and Trace inventory

We recommend a best practice of auditing your physical inventory at least once a week and checking that your counts match between your POS and Metrc daily. As you count inventory, the “Audit Inventory” feature of the Stash app moves with you—making for a fast and easy process that simultaneously audits your physical inventory with your point-of-sale inventory simply by batch scanning barcodes and confirming amounts.

Discrepancy workflows

The “Audit Inventory” feature on the Stash app also comes with built-in manager approvals for any discrepancies. After your staff identifies and submits discrepancies, they must be verified and then approved or rejected by management.

Only employees with the “Manage Inventory” permission have the ability to access this portion of the audit feature. Katie, Inventory Manager at Igadi put it well. The audit feature in the Stash app is "clear and simple. I can even see who submitted a discrepancy and why.”

Pro tip: Utilize the Stash app audit functionality to create a digital paper trail for all of your inventory immediately after it is accepted at your dispensary. Once you’ve accepted a package, quickly scan the package tag, and have an audit record on hand of that inventory from the get-go.

For step by step instructions on how to use the “Audit Inventory” feature within the Stash App, watch the video below:

Distribution management

The “Transfer Between Locations” feature in the Stash app is most useful for multi-location dispensary chains or for any dispensary operation with a central distribution warehouse where product is kept before being divided and transported to individual stores. With the Stash App, enterprise operations are able to easily bulk transfer inventory from store to store in a few taps. Once the transfer is received, it must be accepted in the desktop app.

For step by step instructions on how to use the “Transfer Between Locations” feature within the Stash App, watch the video below:

Move between rooms

With "Move" in stash, you can set up your digital inventory to reflect the physical inventory in your dispensary. For each physical room where you store inventory, you can create a room with the same name, e.g. Back Room, Sales Floor, Refrigerator, Vault, etc. You can also categorize rooms as “for sale” or “not for sale”, which ensures that only inventory in rooms designated “for sale” can be added to customers' carts and reflected on your online live menus for purchase.

We recommend setting up separate physical rooms within your dispensary to securely store your “for sale” inventory and your “not for sale” inventory as a best practice. With this inventory management method, you have full control over what is being sold and can enforce a First-in First-out (FIFO) rule that prevents budtenders from selling newer inventory before products close to expiration or spoilage.

Busy stores are constantly moving products from room to room. “Move Between Rooms” is a brand new feature included in the Stash app designed to give your employees a fast, easy, and mobile way to move items from “not for sale” inventory rooms to the sales floor in bulk.

For step by step instructions on how to use the “Move Between Rooms” feature within the Stash App, watch the video below:

Now it’s your turn to stash it

Inventory management in any retail environment is challenging. In the highly-regulated cannabis industry, inventory management is even more complex. Utilizing a mobile tool like the Stash app on the Nug modernizes your operations, improves efficiency, and empowers your staff to do their jobs more quickly, easily, and accurately, with confidence.

Incorporating Stash also allows for total visibility into your operations, creating a digital paper trail to identify theft and hold your staff accountable to their day to day activities—which is crucial for compliance. 

"Before, we had a team of inventory managers for each location. With the ease of operation and Nug, we streamlined our inventory staff to one employee per location." 

– Ethan Shean, Regional Manager at Strawberry Fields