This article originally appeared in the February 2018 issue of Cannabis Dispensary. To subscribe, click here.
Margo Sperry has been involved with the cannabis industry, in one way or another, for most of her adult life, but her official start came as a result of good timing: When Sperry was considering enrolling in med school in 2013 to become a doctor, Oregon officials made it legal to operate dispensaries in the state. Sperry chose the latter path.
Urban Farmacy opened its doors on Feb. 14, 2014, as a medical dispensary, but expanded to adult-use as the state’s laws evolved. In this interview, Sperry sits down with Cannabis Dispensary Associate Editor Brian MacIver to talk inventory management, organic products, free-sample offerings and more.
MacIver: You carry more than 250 different products on your online menu (not including the different-sized flower packages). How do you manage such a large inventory?
Sperry: I have an inventory manager who is in charge of overseeing the spreadsheet and tracking down discrepancies, and making sure that everything is in order because that’s the No. 1 thing for taking inventory: We have to keep track of every single item.
One of the state’s laws says [inventory] has to be kept in a metal receptacle or a safe, so we built our own vault in the back, and everything has to come off the shelves, and is counted and entered in a spreadsheet and then put away. Then my inventory manager takes that spreadsheet and reconciles it to our point-of-sale system. We use Green Bits. Green Bits has an open API [application program interface] with METRC, so whatever Green Bits has is what METRC has, so it eliminates a step for us.
To read the full article in Cannabis Dispensary's February 2018 issue, click here.
Top photo by Jake Gravbrot
