By Mark Goldfogel

POS stands for Point of Sale, but a more familiar and earthy acronym involving excrement likely describes the emotions you will conjure when you ask your dispensary budtender what system they are on and if they like it.

I helped create the first Seed-to-Sale inventory system in the industry, MJ Freeway. And when we came out with our software, customers loved us.

No one had ever built a variable inventory reconciliation system. In English, that means that nobody had ever built an inventory system for a product that evaporates and falls off without any theft. T-shirts rarely evaporate, so they are either on the shelf, or stolen. Cannabis, however, will evaporate while it’s in the safe waiting to be sold — like Houdini with a skunk smell.

But every time I ask a dispensary employee how they like their POS today, I can sense they want to spit into my pre-roll.

What has changed? Government regulation has gotten so specific and demanding that the majority of dispensary employees are data entry clerks. At the risk of both stereotyping and making a pun, our demographic is not high on data entry.

I’m asked about once a month if I would be willing to create another Seed-to-Sale system, and my answer is always the same: Not unless you are a hardware automation expert willing to commit several million dollars to the project. It’s not about the code; it’s about the hardware integration.

The problem with the Seed-to-Sale providers is that they all require extensive data entry. Often the data entry needs to be duplicated to be entered into the state system, which is sometimes not integrated. Add to that the logistics of managing an all cash business, and you have the makings of the nightmare that is a dispensary owner’s life.

This is not easy work.

After I left MJ Freeway, a helped co-found a company called C4EverSystems. The mission of C4EverSystems is to control cash from the customer to the bank. Other companies like Jane420 are also working on kiosk offerings, and there is a rumor that Bio Track has a kiosk solution in their back pocket. Why? Because it automates a huge logistics nightmare for dispensaries and provides banks with irrefutable proof of the source of the deposit.

We need to build technology that unifies the entire grow process from seed to the bank. One day I would like to fund a competition between all of the POS vendors as to who can provide the fewest clicks Seed-to-Sale. Every nutrient must be entered by batch into a computer system for every plant. RFID and auto-measuring drip systems can calculate every nutrient and drop. Environmental systems regulate temperature, humidity, and lights as well as CO2.

One may argue that there is no real market for this level of sophistication. But I will tell you that this industry already has more technology than almost any industry out there. And the fact that the market can’t substantiate the investment does not seem to have slowed enthusiasm one bit.

Every batch of cannabis sold in Colorado has a batch number that tracks back to a specific plant and the nutrients that were added to it. The vehicle that carried the plant material and the candy bars that were made from its trim have all been accounted for.

In this industry, when a dispensary enters an item into their inventory, it appears on Weed Maps, Leafly, and many other social media sites. Very few other industries offer real-time social media inventory sharing, and none were doing it four years ago. This is technology at its greatest — especially when it works!

As a technologist, living in the cannabis world has been the most fascinating experience of my life. As a binary, logical person, the ambiguity of this industry has nearly driven me mad.

Mark Goldfogel is a founder of C4EverSystems, a cash handling kiosk guaranteed to meet banking compliance guidelines for cannabis transactions, and was a co-founder of MJ Freeway, the popular point of sale software for cannabis businesses, guaranteed to meet government compliance regulations for cannabis. He held management positions at ADP and John Deere. You can reach him at [email protected].