What does a cannabis inspection ask for?

Three practical readings. A premises inspection needs no notice, so the state of the shop is a standing exam rather than a scheduled one. A books examination comes with three days, which sounds generous until you consider what is being asked for and where it currently lives. And subsection (3) settles a question people worry about unnecessarily: records do not have to sit in a filing cabinet behind the counter. Cloud records are fine.

What subsection (3) does not do is relax anything. If location is not the requirement, then retrieval is, and 72 hours is the window in which somebody has to find, assemble and hand over whatever was asked for. A system that can export a year of transactions in an hour and a system that needs a support ticket are in very different positions on the third day.

The revenue side is a separate authority with a different threshold.

Note the word equipment, which appears in both. The register itself is within scope, not only the reports it produced.

Retention is the most common quiet failure, because it is set once during setup by somebody reading one rule, and there is more than one rule.

The licensing rules carry their own, shorter, retention period for business records, and it is published in the corpus with the rest of the rules below. Two clocks means one policy, set to the longer of them, applied to everything. A deletion schedule set to the licensing period will remove tax records the revenue statute still requires, and it will do it automatically and invisibly.

There is a second trap in the same sentence. The five year clock runs from the time to which the record relates, or for as long as you still hold the goods, whichever is later. Long held inventory extends the retention of the paperwork that came with it.

13 of 52 jurisdictions published. A jurisdiction appears only after its rules have been read against its own statute and administrative code.

113 published rules across 13 states exist to produce a record: what has to be written down, by when, and in what form. One state's are below, chosen with the picker above, and read as a group they are a fair description of what an inspection is looking at.

Everybody keeps the sales. The gaps are almost always in the same five places, and they share a quality: each one is a record of something that did not go to plan, which is precisely why it is interesting to an inspector.

The reason on an adjustment. A count changed. A system that records the new number and not why it changed has recorded the smaller half of the event.

The time and method of a destruction. Not the date. The exact time and the method, alongside the reason, and usually after a holding period during which the material has to have been where it was said to be.

The differences on a transfer in. Checking a manifest is not confirming a total. It is accepting or rejecting each identifier and documenting the discrepancies one by one, which is tedious, which is why it is the step people skip.

The outage log. When the state's system is unreachable, the obligation does not pause, it changes shape.

The reconciliation that was late. A deadline the following morning means an inspection lands on whatever the last reconciliation left behind. There is no version of this where the gap is invisible, because the state is holding the other copy.

Here is the thing most compliance software is not built for. An inspector rarely asks for a number. They ask why something happened, and the honest answer has a shape: because this rule said so, and this rule was current on that day.

Most systems can tell you the outcome. The sale completed. The tax was this. The count went from that to this. Far fewer can tell you the input to the decision: which limit was applied and in which units, which identity document type was accepted, which tax rate was in force that week, which version of which rule the software was enforcing when the decision was made.

The difference matters most when a rule has changed since. If the record only holds the outcome, explaining a sale from three months ago means arguing from today's rule about a decision made under a previous one, which is a bad position to argue from. If the decision recorded which version of which rule produced it, the explanation is a lookup.

That is why Bloom supersedes rows rather than editing them, and why what changed is a public page rather than an internal log. A rule with a history is the only kind that can explain an old sale.

None of this needs a vendor to test. Pick one sale from about three months ago, ideally an awkward one, and try to produce five things about it from whatever system you run today.

One, the state's identifier for the package each line came from. Two, the purchase limit that was applied, in the units the rule uses, and what the running total was at that moment. Three, the identity or card check that permitted the sale, including which document type was accepted. Four, every tax line, separately stated, with the rate that was in force that day. Five, which version of which rule the system was enforcing when it let the sale through.

If you can produce all five in a few minutes, you are in good shape and this page was reassurance rather than news. If you can produce three, you have found the two questions you do not want to be asked, and you found them at a moment of your choosing. Either way the exercise costs an afternoon and answers a question that would otherwise be answered by somebody else, on their schedule.

The same five things are the reason what a cannabis register has to do is a longer list than most people expect.