By System Transition Causes Sales Failures
New Mexico’s new cannabis tracking system, New Mexico Seed to Sale (NMS2S), launched September 1, but retailers have experienced issues transitioning from the old system, BioTrack. When BioTrack went offline on September 7, it crashed and did not properly add inventory to NMS2S, Source NM reports.
The failures have left some businesses unable to sell products, leading to steep financial losses. Matt Kennicott, executive director of the New Mexico Cannabis Association (NMCA), told Source NM that one retailer had about 50,000 items that failed to transfer over from the old system, leaving “hundreds of thousands of dollars of inventory” unsellable by the retailer.
Another retailer had $150,000 worth of its top-selling product erroneously labelled as a different product, which prevented further sales. One of the state’s larger retailers had $460,000 worth of product miscategorized, all of which it was unable to sell.
One retailer told Kennicott that they had so many issues they will likely have to hire one full-time and one more half-time employee to fix the errors.
Manual Workflows And Tax Calculations
Sabrina Aragon, chief operating officer of High Desert Relief, told Source NM that the new system requires testing results for products transferred from the old system to be manually entered. That means customers will have to trust that retailers aren’t accidentally, or purposely, entering numbers incorrectly.
Aragon gave the new system “a 4-out-of-10 on functionality right now, just from an operational standpoint.” She noted that the new system also requires dispensary employees to manually calculate the three different levels of taxes on each sale.
Those taxes include county, state, and excise taxes.
Businesses Work To Correct Errors
The inventory transfer problems have affected retailers of varying sizes across the state, with some reporting products that cannot be sold until errors in the new system are corrected.
Under the new system, retailers must manually enter testing results for transferred products and manually calculate taxes on each sale, adding to the operational burden created by the failed inventory transfers.
Businesses are continuing to work through the transfer errors as the state’s cannabis retail sector adjusts to the new tracking requirements.
