Why dispensary books need a specialist
A licensed store in Denver or Colorado Springs is juggling cash drawers, debit-only card processors, delivery aggregators, loyalty discounts and a 15% retail marijuana sales tax that has to be separated cleanly from the 2.9% state sales tax charged on medical sales. Layer a local excise or special sales tax on top — Denver's additional marijuana sales tax, for example — and a generalist bookkeeper will misclassify revenue within the first month.
We build your chart of accounts around how MED and the Colorado Department of Revenue actually expect a Retail or Medical Marijuana Store to report: gross retail sales, medical sales, excise passed through from the cultivator, discounts, and local tax add-ons, each in its own bucket so your monthly sales tax return reconciles to the penny.
Daily reconciliation, not month-end guesswork
Cash shortages and POS drift are the fastest way to invite an MED inspection or a Department of Revenue audit. We reconcile your point-of-sale Z-reports, cash deposits and card settlement batches every business day, not once a month, so variances get caught while the security footage and budtender schedule are still fresh.
Your METRC sales events are cross-checked against POS revenue weekly. When a package transfer, waste log or return doesn't tie out, we flag it before it becomes a discrepancy MED asks you to explain during a compliance check.
280E-aware cost allocation at the register
A retail store's biggest 280E lever is cost of goods sold — the wholesale cost of product actually resold to customers. We track vendor invoices, transportation costs to bring product into your store, and inventory shrinkage so your COGS deduction is fully supported, while occupancy, marketing, security guards on the sales floor and budtender wages stay correctly classified as nondeductible under Section 280E.
On the Colorado return, we apply the state-level subtraction for expenditures disallowed under IRC Section 280E, which lets many of those same operating costs reduce your Colorado taxable income even though they can't touch your federal bill.
Handling delivery and hospitality license revenue streams
Stores that also operate under a Marijuana Hospitality license or run compliant delivery need revenue streams tracked separately from standard in-store retail sales, since each carries its own tax and reporting treatment. We set up dedicated revenue accounts so nothing gets blended together on your sales tax return.
