The 15% excise tax starts at your loading dock
Colorado's 15% retail marijuana excise tax is assessed on the first transfer of unprocessed retail marijuana from a cultivation facility, calculated against the Average Market Rate the Department of Revenue publishes every quarter (or, for negotiated arm's-length transfers between unrelated parties, against the actual transaction price). Get the AMR category wrong — flower versus trim versus wet whole plant — and you'll either overpay or underpay every single transfer.
We track every transfer manifest in METRC alongside your internal harvest batch records, apply the correct AMR bucket, and reconcile the excise tax due against what actually gets remitted, catching mismatches before the Department of Revenue does.
Absorption costing across plant stages
Because 280E limits cultivators to deducting the cost of producing the crop — not selling it — we build absorption-costing models that pool direct labor, growing medium, nutrients, utilities allocated to canopy square footage, and depreciation on cultivation-specific equipment into work-in-process inventory by stage: clone, vegetative, flower, harvest, dry and cure.
Costs move with the batch through METRC's growth phases, so when a lot is finally sold or transferred, the cost basis reported on your books matches the cost basis you can defend to the IRS as inventoriable production cost under Section 471 and Treasury Regulation 1.471-11.
Yield variance and shrinkage tracking
Cultivation facilities lose material to trim waste, mother plant retirement, pest destruction and moisture loss between wet and dry weight. We track expected versus actual yield by strain and by room, giving ownership real cost-per-gram data and giving MED a defensible waste log that reconciles to your plant destruction records.
Accelerator license cost-sharing arrangements
Cultivators operating under Colorado's accelerator license program often share space or equipment with a qualified accelerator-endorsed licensee. We track shared and allocated costs between the two operations so each entity's cost basis and 280E position stays independently defensible.
