In 2012, Massachusetts legalized medical cannabis, and in 2016, the commonwealth legalized recreational cannabis through a ballot initiative. A savvy group of investors decided it was the perfect time to open Happy Valley, a full-service premium cannabis company.

Happy Valley cultivates and extracts cannabinoids and manufactures, distributes, and sells cannabis-based consumer packaged goods, such as concentrates, edibles, vape-oil, and more. The cannabis company started as a 45,000-square-foot facility in Gloucester before expanding with a retail dispensary at the Gloucester facility in 2020, opening another dispensary in East Boston in 2021, and wholesaling its products to other Massachusetts cannabis retailers—all within the same timeframe.

During this time for Happy Valley, according to Kai Earthsong, VP of Supply Chain Management, operating a growing company on QuickBooks as well as with Excel spreadsheets—in a very complicated industry, no less—was very challenging.

“In 2020 and 2021, we didn’t have insights,” Earthsong says. “We were just trying to keep the ship running, track essentials, and make sure that our books were reconciled. More sophisticated and ambitious aspects of information tracking and analysis—like tracking cost actuals or doing runway analysis—were all just kind of sparkles in our eyes.”

The challenges and frustrations of relying on a basic financial solution and error-prone spreadsheets were many, which is why in mid-2020, the Happy Valley team considered upgrading to a comprehensive ERP solution.

Spreadsheet Mayhem

When Happy Valley began operating, executives created Excel spreadsheets to manage its complex processes, including inventory management, production planning, management and tracking of consumables, procurement, and cataloging test data from independent third-party labs. Sean Corrigan, VP of Operations, says they used at least 50 different Excel spreadsheets to stay afloat.

“The challenge,” he says, “was that none of them talked to each other.”

Dealing with siloed information along with manually reconciling financial data, resolving invoices, tracking costs of goods sold, managing inventory, and tracking purchases while being required to sign in and out of QuickBooks was a difficult, time consuming situation that provided limited operational insights. The need for a comprehensive ERP solution that could automate operations and provide detailed data was never more evident.

“We had an idea, some back-of-the-napkin kind of math on our costs,” says Corrigan, “but to really understand and to record our labor and get down to the penny on everything that we do is really what’s going to help us drive our business into the future.”

Transforming Mayhem into Order with Acumatica

The search for an ERP solution that could handle the unique needs of a cannabis cultivator, manufacturer, wholesaler, and retailer led them to a few cannabis-centered systems, like MJ Freeway and Trellis. Unfortunately, what they found was not what they needed.

“[N]othing was a true 360-degree ERP system that had the ability to be customized,” says Earthsong.

As the ERP search continued, Happy Valley’s CPA firm discovered a solution that looked promising: QuantumLeaf, an Acumatica VAR and ISV that provides a cannabis-specific application. QuantumLeaf’s cannabis expertise combined with Acumatica’s cloud-based platform, customization capabilities, robust financial reporting, automated workflows, consumption-based pricing, and ability to automate data collection for METRC—a state-mandated track and trace compliance software application—sealed the deal for Happy Valley.

“I’ve tried a lot of different systems. Acumatica is the first one we feel actually encompasses our whole business. It gives us the tools that we really need to drive our
business forward, and in a market and industry that is compressing,” Corrigan says.

Happy Valley chose to deploy Acumatica Manufacturing, they were able to live department by department, and the benefits started rolling in.

Working with and on a single database that connects data across the organization has yielded insights into the entire operation. Ledgers, sales orders, shipments, and invoicing all happen in Acumatica, netting the Happy Valley team the information they need to handle their sales, accounting, and financial needs—without manual, time-wasting procedures.

“The Acumatica/QuantumLeaf solution is now a part of our DNA,” says Earthsong. “We rely on it day in and day out for information access, production order planning,
procurement and tracking of what we produce, inventory control, spot counts, cycle counts, inventory awareness—you name it.”

Such information access has led to:

• • Understanding their true costs of doing business, capturing overhead, labor, and materials costs using individualized dashboards.
  • Increasing efficiency in tracking strains and batches, which must have unique lot numbers and their attributes recorded and managed as well as conform to METRC compliance mandates.
  • Automating transaction reporting for all compliance systems.
  • Streamlining supply chain management, ending their reliance on Excel.
  • Achieving a deep awareness of costs, leading to better decision making.

Ultimately, Happy Valley believes implementing Acumatica was the right way to go and urges other businesses to follow its lead.

“There’s a lot of operators going out of business. They don’t truly understand what their costs are,” says Corrigan. “Understand how your business is being run. It might be a little scary to change things, but [deploying Acumatica] is one of the better decisions that we’ve made as a company.”

For more Happy Valley details, read its full customer success story, and contact our experts today to learn how Acumatica can help you thrive in today’s uncertain economy.