What is Metrc and do I have to use it?

The most useful thing to read on this subject is the company's own description of itself, because it is more careful than the way the software industry quotes it.

Its five stated aims, read the same day, are: tighten regulated market security, simplify product recall, ensure valid tax revenue accounting, document chain of custody, and ease inspection, auditing and reporting.

Read that list again with a licensee's question in mind. Every item is about the record. Not one of them is about whether a particular customer may buy a particular quantity at a particular hour. The vendor closest to the statute in this industry makes no claim to know what the statute says, and it is right not to, because that is not what it is for.

Which makes the sentence eleven dispensary software companies lean on, that they integrate with Metrc, an answer to a question nobody asked. Reporting a prohibited sale accurately is still a prohibited sale, filed neatly.

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

Notice what the published rows above name. They name an agency and the system that agency operates, with a statute reference and an administrative code reference. They do not name a software company, because the rule does not name one either.

That distinction has a practical payoff for anybody choosing software. When a state re-tenders its tracking contract, the rule number usually does not move. The obligation stays where it was, the interface changes underneath it, and a system that modelled the obligation rather than the vendor survives the change with a new adapter instead of a new project.

The single most expensive assumption a multi state operator can make is that reporting is one integration. Washington's board, in its own words:

Two things follow. The first is obvious: a shop in one state and a shop in the other are filing into different systems in different shapes, and a vendor whose whole compliance story is one integration has a gap in the second state.

The second is less obvious and more useful. Washington did not only change vendor, it changed the shape of the obligation, from a live transactional interface to periodic reporting. Software that assumed every state works like Metrc has to be rebuilt for that, not reconfigured. So the question to put to a vendor is not which systems it integrates with, it is what happens the day your state changes the shape of the thing it wants.

Metrc describes the purpose of its interface plainly:

Access runs through keys, and the important thing about the keys is whose they are. Metrc's own guidance, read on September 6, 2026, is that licensees may only provide their confidential API key to state agency-approved vendors. The credential belongs to the licence holder. It is issued to her, it is revocable by her, and a software vendor holds it on her behalf.

That is worth being blunt about because it is a portability question dressed as a technical one. If leaving a vendor means losing your connection to the state, the connection was never really yours. Ask where the key is stored, who can read it, and what happens to it on the day you give notice.

Metrc also publishes what validation does and does not mean:

A validated integrator badge therefore says a company completed a process, per state, and says nothing about whether the software is any good. It is a real and necessary qualification, and it is not the recommendation the badge is often used as.

61 published rules across 11 states turn on the tracking system directly. One state at a time:

These are the parts of the job an integration does not do for you. A reporting deadline is a deadline whether the interface is up or down. A rule about what to do when the state's system is unreachable is a rule about your records, not about the vendor's uptime. And a rule requiring every sale to be recorded against a specific tagged package is a rule about what your register may complete, which no reporting layer can rescue after the fact.

Bloom implements the Metrc interface and the Washington CCRS file format against their published specifications. A sale writes its report into an outbox with an idempotency key at the moment it is rung and a worker posts it, so a retry cannot file the same sale twice and an outage does not lose one.

Bloom is not a validated integrator in any state, and no sale has been posted from Bloom to a live regulator system. That is the current position, it is on this page because a reader deciding between systems is entitled to it, and it will be updated here when it changes rather than quietly dropped.