Fifty separate workbooks
Inventory, purchasing and lab test data sat in files that did not connect.
Acumatica Manufacturing Case Study
How Happy Valley, a Massachusetts cannabis company, moved from QuickBooks and spreadsheets to Acumatica Manufacturing Edition.
About Happy Valley
Happy Valley breeds, grows and manufactures medicinal and recreational cannabis products, then sells them wholesale and in its own stores. After Massachusetts legalized recreational cannabis in 2016, a group of investors secured a license and built a 45,000-square-foot facility in Gloucester. The company opened dispensaries in Gloucester in 2020 and East Boston the following year.
The Challenge
Happy Valley started on QuickBooks, a financial-only package. As operations grew, the team built a spreadsheet for nearly every process, including inventory, production planning and lab test results. There were 50 of them, and none shared data.
Finance reconciled those files against QuickBooks by hand. With no receiving records, invoices were paid on approval, and short deliveries came to light only when stock ran out. Cannabis prices were falling, and the company's cost figures were rough estimates.
Happy Valley needed one flexible system with automated workflows, full product traceability and accurate costs, ready to adapt as it expands into other states.
Inventory, purchasing and lab test data sat in files that did not connect.
Invoices were paid with no proof the full order had arrived.
Labor and product costs were rough estimates.
The state's METRC system needed data entered, imported or synced from other tools.
The Solution
Happy Valley evaluated several cannabis-specific applications before choosing Acumatica. It wanted a cloud system, manufacturing and inventory modules with room to customize, and consumption-based licensing that does not charge per user as headcount grows.
Happy Valley went live one department at a time, starting with finance and wholesale. Ledgers, sales orders and invoicing now run in the same system, and the sales team sees accurate inventory. Both departments saw the benefit right away.
Departments now record overhead, labor and materials they could not fully identify before. Each team works from its own dashboard showing today's and tomorrow's priorities. Costs are tracked batch by batch across raw materials, work in process and finished goods.
The company grows about 50 cultivars at a time, and each strain and batch carries its own lot number. Its attributes are recorded through inventory and testing, and lot tracing follows regulated material from its source through extraction, packaging and delivery. Every batch can be traced from start to finish.
Massachusetts requires METRC, a standalone track-and-trace application used in several states. Acumatica now connects to METRC and other state compliance systems in real time. Required transaction reporting is automated.
Purchasing used to run in Excel. Procurement now runs in Acumatica with promised dates, purchase receipts and MRP. The company no longer runs out of packaging materials or products.
Tableau and the dispensary sales applications connect to Acumatica without custom programming. Reports draw on the same data with no extra data entry.
The Result
Happy Valley now sees its true cost of doing business, from cultivation through manufacturing, testing and sale. It made more than 1.2 million pre-rolls last year, so a few cents per unit adds up. Its next plans are a third Massachusetts dispensary, the state limit, and a manufacturing facility in Newburyport.
Ledgers, sales orders and invoicing in one system.
Production order planning with batch-level costs.
Lot tracking, spot counts and cycle counts.
A real-time connection to METRC.