It's one thing to find a great accountant who knows your industry, it's another thing entirely to be a cannabis business who finds a great accountant who knows your industry.
Cannabis business owners are a little leery of anyone touting the name "expert" and we get it. Pretty much anyone can slap a title on themselves now and start touting their services. Cannabis business owners in particular are susceptible just being in a heavily cash focused industry that's growing faster than most of imagined.
Did you know that prominent accounting software programs are not cannabis friendly? Your average bookkeeper who may understand cost accounting enough to make it seem like you're getting by may not be aware of the dangers of setting your business up on popular accounting platforms like QuickBooks for example. Legal cannabis businesses are already facing significant banking challenges, human resource challenges and tax law challenges just to name a few. However, even though looking to do their accounting and bookkeeping the right way are losing their data due to unforeseen shutdowns when they mistakenly set their books up with a non-canna friendly software provider.
Part of our business model before we even started tacking the title "industry experts" on was making sure we had the team in place to actually serve our clients. After years of providing CFO services across many industries we understood clearly that showing up with the professional team in place was the key to our clients success. If a client needed a new entity's corporate documents set up, we needed to know who we could trust to send them to. If a client was struggling with their point of sale system not getting them efficient reporting, we needed to be ready to help them implement a new system or work arounds. With our cannabis clients, we needed to know on day one which accounting software would not only work to provide them the data they needed, but that we could trust not to freeze their accounts.
We highly recommend that canna CEOs interview their service professionals to ensure that more than just being industry experts, they can tell you why and how they are going to add value to your business. In this case, making sure your accountant and bookkeeper know which software is going to keep your critical data safe is invaluable.