What does cannabis point of sale software have to do?

Any till can take a card. What makes a cannabis register a different piece of software is that most of its work happens before the payment and after it, and almost none of that work is optional or configurable.

Before: is this person old enough, and is the document proving it one the rule accepts. Is the shop allowed to be selling at this hour. Has this package passed the test it has to pass. Would this basket exceed a ceiling that is measured in grams for one category and millilitres for another. Is this discount one the state permits, or one it specifically forbids because of what else is in the basket.

After: the transaction has to appear in the state's system as a sale against a specific tagged package, the tax has to be stated separately on a document with defined contents, the inventory has to reconcile by a deadline that is usually the following morning, and every one of those steps has to still be explainable when somebody asks about it next year.

None of that is a feature. It is the rule, and a system that treats it as a feature will have it switched off in some shop somewhere because it was getting in the way.

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

Every published rule carries the moment it fires as a field rather than as a paragraph of prose, which is what makes it enforceable by a machine instead of memorable by a person. The moments are ordinary shop events: verifying an age, ringing a sale, applying a discount, taking a return, receiving a transfer, sending one out, closing a shift, destroying waste, adjusting a count, printing a label, making a delivery, filing a report.

That framing is the difference between software that enforces rules and software that displays them. A rule attached to the moment it applies fires on its own. A rule written in a help article fires when somebody remembers it.

The column that repays a second look is the state count. Where a moment carries rules in every published state, it is a genuine constant of the category and any serious system has to model it. Where it carries rules in only some, it is a place where a system built for one market quietly does the wrong thing in another.

374 of the 479 published rules carry the outcome block. That word is doing real work. A rule whose outcome is block describes conduct the state prohibits, and a message a cashier can dismiss on a busy Friday is not an implementation of it. The correct behaviour is that the sale does not complete.

Warn is different and it is not weaker, it is narrower. It marks the places where a person has to exercise judgment that software cannot: whether somebody is visibly intoxicated, whether a document looks altered. Software cannot make that call, so what it owes is to raise the question, capture the answer, and record who answered it. The value of a warning is entirely in the record it leaves.

Require approval sits between them. The transaction is permitted but only on a condition somebody has to attest to, and the attestation is the point. If your system has a supervisor override, the useful question is what it writes down when it is used.

Below is every published rule for Arizona that fires while a customer is at the counter: verifying age, verifying a card, ringing the sale, applying a discount, taking a return, handling a sample. A further 20 rules fire away from it, and they are on the Arizona page in full.

Retail software outside cannabis sells a product. Cannabis software sells a package, and the state issued its identifier before it ever reached you. That single difference cascades through the whole design: receiving is not a purchase order, it is accepting specific identifiers against a manifest; a sale is not a stock decrement, it is a transaction recorded against an identifier; and a count that does not tie back to those identifiers is not an inventory, it is an estimate.

The practical consequence is that a sale line without a package identifier cannot be completed rather than being completed and fixed later. Fixing it later means a correction in the state's system, and corrections are what an inspection reads first.

The slip handed to a customer is not marketing collateral with a total on it. In the states published so far it has defined contents, and the tax has to appear separately from the price rather than folded into it.

No published rule for Arizona states the receipt requirement in those terms. Pick another state above to see one, or open the Arizona page for everything that has been published for it.

How the tax itself is calculated, what stacks on what, who is exempt and how it rounds is a longer question with its own page: how cannabis retail tax is calculated.

20 of Arizona's published rules fire somewhere other than the register: receiving, transferring, adjusting, destroying, delivering, closing, reporting and retaining. This is the half of the job that gets left to a spreadsheet, and it is the half an inspection actually examines.

A reconciliation deadline is the clearest example. If the rule says the day's inventory has to be reconciled in the state's system by a fixed hour the following morning, then that deadline, not the close of trade, is the end of the working day. A destruction has a holding period and a documented time and method. An adjustment has to carry a reason. A transfer in has to be checked against a manifest identifier by identifier and the differences documented per identifier, not in total.

Every one of those is a place where software either produces the record as a by-product of the work or leaves a person to produce it afterwards from memory. The second option is how shops end up reconstructing a February afternoon in October, which is the subject of what an inspection asks for.

Six questions, none of which require a demo to answer. Which rules does the system enforce, named individually rather than as compliance. Where did each of them come from, as a citation. When was that source last read, as a date. What happens when a rule changes after a sale has already been made under the old one. What does the system do when the state's reporting system is unreachable for an afternoon. And what can you take with you if you leave.

A system that can answer all six is doing the job whether or not it is this one. A system that answers the first and goes quiet on the rest is asking you to carry the risk on its behalf, and the signature on the report is yours.