|Software as a Service or SaaS is vital to keep many processes moving and improve the level of transactions between buyers and sellers. The cannabis industry has seen much improvement in areas that are typically bottlenecks in production and sales such as, e-commerce, customer relationship management (CRM), seed-to-sale, business aggregators and inventory management. The emergence of these B2B services empower not only cultivators and dispensaries but also customers.
|The Power of Cannabis CRM and Business Aggregation|

The marijuana industry started and thrived from independent businesses and dispensaries working together towards the goal of growth and convenience. This is where services such as CanPay, Baker and Amercanex come in.

CanPay’s goal is to remove the muss and fuss of cash by providing an electronic debit payment solution to consumers. This removes the risk of using cash in transactions, especially when doing larger transactions with retail businesses.

While CanPay takes care of a singular aspect of cannabis transaction, Baker pushes to control the entire front-end by providing an interface for point-of-sale, task management, loyalty programs, email marketing, online shopping and providing sales analytics for dispensaries. Baker is live across 250 dispensaries in Canada and 10 states across the United States, expected to grow further into more states as legalization goes through a sweeping movement.

The ability of Baker to make both marketing and sales easier is only challenged by a similar platform that creates its own cannabis economy. Amercanex is the first free and open marketplace for the cannabis industry that gives the participants a platform to buy and sell cannabis at fair prices. Like a smaller version of the stock exchange, Amercanex provides a realistic trade experience while ensuring a secure marketplace for everyone. While it provides end-to-end support for many businesses, its ability to aggregate the entire market into a singular body is a sight to behold in terms of software services.

|Compliance and Self-Policing|

What makes the legal cannabis industry unique in its entirely is the voluntary self-policing that happens within businesses to allow its product to meet government compliance standards for their highly regulated industry. Compliance software have become lifesavers for many businesses that would prefer to prevent headaches in this area.

MMJMenu is among the most trusted management software in many dispensaries. From point-of-sale to inventory control to patient management, MMJMenu provides the necessary control that ensures compliance with state laws. Each gram of cannabis will be accounted for and it keeps the businesses and patients connected without excessive hassle to either through visit tracking, medical notifications and communication with listed patients.

Knalysis takes care of the patient side of cannabis compliance, providing a wellness solution for patients and a patient management system for businesses. Their focus on customer wellness monitoring gives the power for patients to control their medical treatments and track strain efficacy, while their patient management gives a hub for medical practitioners to track treatments, from dosages to intake to strains to appointments.

Proteus420 takes care of the other side of compliance, giving both doctors and storefront dispensaries the power to fully manage their patients through a holistic patient-doctor data management, full financial management, human resources management, e-commerce and vendor-to-vendor communication. This software improves the efficiency of taking care all the human resources necessary to run a highly compliant cannabis business free from regulatory issues.

Simplifya and Adherence’s goals are simple: pin down chain of command within cannabis businesses to ensure accountability and compliance is present. Non-compliance is an expensive slippery slope to go down for businesses and either software gives you the ability to either audit, track and take care of risk factors associated with lax methods. Cannasure, a cannabis business insurance company, takes care of businesses through management of financial risk factors that come from possible non-compliance.

|Seed-to-Sale Services: Efficiency Maximized|

Seed-to-Sale services aim to improve efficiency from top to bottom. Among the well-known seed-to-sale technologies in the cannabis business are BioTrackTHC, HempTech and Viridian Sciences. These companies utilized different methods but have a unified goal: creating solutions at every stage of the cannabis business vertical. Their cultivation operations help in streamlining workflows and give the growers insights on either yield, profits, cultivation rates, genealogies, profits derived from specific cultivars or everything in between through automation.

These types of software manage data required for compliance and product labeling while providing point-of-sale systems that perform direct equipment integrations, reducing the human aspect in between sales and mitigate errors that are derived from human inefficiencies. Many SaaS that aim to control end-to-end processes do so with patented systems, cloud-based integrations and network connectivity to ensure no information gets lost in between the back-end and the front-end operations.

KIND, one of the biggest compliance software providers, has also added a government division with Microsoft to help seed-to-sale technology to flourish and provide an even higher level of accountability and transparency. It strengthens government standards in highly regulated cannabis compliance programs, empowering government customers through collecting and monitoring critical data needed for policy-making for cannabis businesses.

Software as a Service answers the near infinite demand of the cannabis industry to create highly efficient business practices that maximize compliance with regulations. New software services will provide better, stronger solutions for clients depending on improvements on standards and, with a robust $6.7 Billion economy, there’s no stopping the exponential growth for the cannabis industry and related services on all fronts.