A Chart of Accounts Built Around 280E
The chart of accounts is the tax strategy. Every cost account gets tagged inventoriable or non-inventoriable at setup, production costs get broken out further by function so allocations hold up later, and departments or classes track activity by location, license and business line.
Done right, the trial balance produces the COGS computation on its own. Done wrong, someone tries to rebuild it from memory in March — and that reconstruction is exactly what an examiner will take apart.
- Inventoriable-versus-period-cost tagging at the account level
- Departmental tracking by license, location and function
- Clean separation of plant-touching and non-plant-touching activity
- Consistent vendor and item mapping to keep costing stable period to period
The Monthly Close
We follow a fixed close calendar with a written checklist: bank and cash reconciliation including vault counts, POS or invoice revenue tie-out, an inventory rollforward reconciled to BioTrack, accrual and prepaid schedules, payroll reconciled to what was actually filed, intercompany eliminations, and a variance review against budget and prior period.
What you get is a package, not a folder dump: statements, key metrics, written variance commentary, and an open-items list with names and dates attached.
Discipline for a Cash-Heavy Business
Wherever currency is involved, the bookkeeping is your first line of defense. Daily cash logs, dual counts, over/short tracking, documented deposits and a vault reconciliation tied to the ledger together form the record that shows income was fully reported.
We also keep the documentation cannabis-compliant Illinois financial institutions require, so a banking relationship doesn't get pulled over a reporting request the operator wasn't ready for.
Catch-Up and Cleanup Work
Plenty of operators come to us with years of neglected or unreliable books. Cleanup follows a set sequence: establish an inventory baseline, rebuild the chart of accounts, reconstruct bank and cash activity, rebuild the inventory rollforward from BioTrack and purchase records, then re-close each period going forward.
We scope the cleanup with a fixed sequence and a defined end date, so it doesn't turn into an open-ended project.
Systems and Workflow
We set up accounting platforms, BioTrack integrations, POS connections, AP workflow and document management sized to the operator, and we write the procedures down. Documented workflow survives staff turnover, which is frequent in this industry.
Where a client keeps bookkeeping in-house, we supervise: we design the system, review the close, and own the technical positions while the internal team handles daily entries.
