A dispensary you have never sold wants net 30 on a $12,000 first order

A dispensary you have never sold wants net 30 on a $12,000 first order.

Your account exec is stoked he finally opened that door. The buyer needs it on the truck this week. Of course.

So you do what this industry has always done.

You call two people you trust and ask if they have heard anything bad. You try to confirm that the license is active. Maybe you check out there menu on Weedmaps. Check in with a credit association? Google? Chat GPT?

Then you ship out those pre-rolls and find out in 90 days whether you were right.

That is not credit analysis. That is a reference check with your working capital attached.

There are 3 decisions sitting inside that single order, and most operators collapse them into one.

Do we sell them??

How much do we let ride at any one time??

On what terms, and what has to change before that number moves??

A true credit score from an independant credit scoring and reporting agency might not make any of those decisions for you. BUT…It gives you a consistent place to start instead of a different gut feeling every time a different rep walks in waving an order.

It sorts the account into a risk band before you spend an afternoon on it. Most account scores are not close calls. The score tells you which ones are.

It lets you compare two operators who might look identical on paper. Same state, same license type, similar door count, but completely different payment behavior.

And it anchors the grey area, where the right answer is rarely yes or no. It is usually a smaller opening limit, or half up front and half COD, or net 15 until they prove it out.

Tighter terms are not a punishment.

They are how a marginal account becomes a good account.

The score is the starting point. Your judgement is still the job.

The score is your defense against your AE.

Nobody knows your accounts the way you do. You know which buyer always pays after the weekend, which store or chain is quietly renegotiating its lease, which brand just lost the rep who kept the relationship honest.

No model replaces that.

What a score does is give that knowledge something to push against. It is the sharpest tool available for making a good credit judgement stronger, because it does the part you cannot do from inside your own four walls. It reads behavior across counterparties you have never sold and states you have never shipped to, the same way every month, whether you are in the middle of harvest or in the middle of a raise.

You bring the context. The score brings the pattern. The decision is better than either one alone.

This is why we are building Reklaim Credit Solutions and this is what Sam Fensterstock has been instructing credit professionals about for over three decades.