Most cannabis vendors are sitting on a collections problem they may not fully see yet.

Most cannabis vendors are sitting on a collections problem they may not fully see yet.

You extended credit to grow your business. That was the right call, even if it doesn’t always feel like it. COD protects cash, but it also restricts your growth. Inevitably, somewhere between the invoice and the due date, the process breaks down and cash stops moving.

No enforceable credit agreement on file.

No documented communication history.

No real-time visibility into whether your customer’s risk profile has changed since you first approved them.

These aren’t edge cases. They’re standard operating procedure for most cannabis vendors right now, because traditional commercial credit rating and reporting agencies have not touched the industry.

Here’s the part that stings even harder: the longer an invoice goes unpaid, the harder it is to collect and the less likely it ever gets paid. That’s not an opinion. That’s arithmetic. Our CRO at Reklaim Credit Solutions , Sam Fensterstock, has spent 35 years helping companies solve exactly this.

The fix isn’t complicated, but it does require discipline.

Segment your portfolio by risk.

Document every interaction.

Resolve disputes fast.

Know your customers’ financial health continuously, not 90 days after something goes wrong.

That last one is where most vendors are completely blind. They approved credit once and never looked again. Meanwhile the customer’s payment behavior shifted, their balance sheet tightened, and nobody caught it until the invoice was already over 60 days past due.

Behavioral changes in AR aging data tend to show up before a payment goes delinquent. Most vendors just don’t have the tools to see them, or to act on them if they do.

This is exactly the problem we are building Reklaim Credit Solutions to solve. Continuous monitoring. Credit scores that tell you not just who your customer was when you first extended terms, but who they are right now.

If you’re managing trade credit in cannabis manually, you’re carrying risk you can’t quantify.

That’s the real collections mistake.