Most dispensary KPIs get looked at once a month, in a meeting, off a spreadsheet somebody built on a Sunday night. By then the answers are archaeology. The dead stock is already dead. The best seller already stocked out. The special that quietly ate your margin already ran its full two weeks.
We run a store. Pekin’s Local Dispensary & Supply in Pekin, Illinois is ours, and every figure below came off its live point-of-sale the morning this was written. What follows is the short list we read before the doors open, what each number catches, and what it looks like when it goes wrong.
These are directional figures from one small Illinois store over the 30 days ending September 7, 2026. They are not a projection of anyone else’s results, and none of them are a promise about yours.
Why daily beats monthly for dispensary KPIs
Every number on this list decays. Inventory that is slow today is markdown-able; inventory that has been slow for six weeks is a write-off. A discount that is running 3 points hot this morning is a settings fix; the same discount noticed at month-end is money you already gave away.
The difference is not effort. It is who does the pulling. When the report requires a manager to export, filter, and pivot, it gets run when there is time, which is never. When the assistant pulls it and hands you seven lines at open, it gets read every day. That is the whole trick, and it is why we wired our own POS into an assistant instead of buying another dashboard. We wrote about the underlying pattern in dispensary money leaks.
1. Dead stock: the share of your shelf that stopped moving
The first number is the ugliest, so we look at it first. Of 792 items in our catalog, 127 sold nothing at all in the 28-day velocity window. Those 127 items are about a quarter of every unit on hand and roughly 28% of what the shelf cost us to fill, somewhere near twenty thousand dollars at cost sitting perfectly still.
Add the 224 items that are simply out of stock and 44% of the catalog is either frozen or absent. Only about 441 items are actually turning. That is not a crisis; it is normal retail, and knowing it is normal is exactly why you want the number in front of you rather than in your imagination.
What it gets you: you find dead stock while a small markdown still fixes it, instead of at fire-sale time when the only lever left is a big one. The item at the very top of our list has 98 units on hand and sold two in four weeks. Nobody was hiding that. Nobody had looked.
2. Days of supply: the best seller about to disappear
The same report read from the other end is a stockout alarm. Sixty-five items were in stock with under two weeks of supply at their current rate of sale. Several of the fastest movers in the store were down to a single unit.
That is the number that costs you money invisibly. A dead item at least sits there reminding you it exists. A best seller that runs out just produces a customer who drove to your parking lot, did not find the thing, and bought less, or nothing, and you never see the transaction that did not happen.
What it gets you: you catch a best seller before it stocks out, and you walk into the vendor order knowing which SKUs to protect. On the other side of the same list, 79 items carry more than six months of supply. Those two facts, side by side, are most of a purchasing decision. More on the mechanics in dispensary inventory management.
3. Discount leakage: what actually rang up, not what you configured
This is the one that surprises people. Across the window, just under 20% of gross sales left as discounts. One dollar in five.
The important part is not the size, it is the composition. A large share of it came from lines that are not configured promotions at all: loyalty point redemptions, employee purchases, and manager overrides. The single busiest discount in the store was the smallest rung of the rewards ladder, fired more than 1,200 times. It appears on no promotions calendar. If you audit your specials page, you will never see it.
That gap has a rule attached to it. What is configured is a plan. What fired is the truth. When the two disagree, the register wins, every time. Any operator who reports discount spend off the specials calendar is reporting a document, not a business.
What it gets you: you see which special is quietly eating margin while it is still running, and you find out that the largest discount in your store is one nobody scheduled. We took a longer run at this in the dispensary pricing leak.
4. License concentration: who owns too much of your shelf
We track the share of net sales coming from each cultivation or distribution license, and we hold ourselves to a ceiling. This month our largest supplier landed at 35.2% of net sales, just over our own line. The next one down sits at 16%.
To be clear about what that ceiling is: it is a house rule, not a regulation. Illinois does not cap how much of a dispensary’s purchasing can come from one license. We set the limit ourselves because a supplier that funds a third of your revenue starts making your merchandising decisions for you, and because losing them on short notice should be survivable. Actual state requirements live with the Illinois Department of Financial and Professional Regulation and the state’s cannabis program, and they differ everywhere. Confirm your own state’s rules before you copy anybody’s playbook.
What it gets you: you walk into a vendor meeting already knowing who earns their shelf space, and you can pick the next special from a supplier that still has room rather than one that pushes you further over the line.
5. Gross margin, measured after the discounts
Our gross margin for the window came in at 45.9%, and the only version of that number worth reading is the one calculated after discounts, not before. Given that a fifth of gross went out the door as discounts, a margin figure taken off list would be a fiction with a decimal point on it.
Margin is also where the tax conversation starts. Cost of goods sold is doing heavy lifting for cannabis retailers, which is why sloppy inventory costing is expensive twice: once on the shelf, once on the return. The IRS position on marijuana industry taxation is worth reading in the original, and we covered the operator side in 280E tax compliance.
What it gets you: you know whether this week’s promotion actually paid for itself, before you run it again next week.
Talk to somebody who runs one
If you want to argue with any of this, bring a number from your own store. Thomas Howard is a cannabis attorney who also owns and operates Pekin’s, and Collateral Base has worked with more than 100 operators across 30-plus states. Book a call and ask about your own shop. Operator to operator, not a sales demo.
6. Customers per day, and how many are new
We averaged about 79 transactions a day across the window, from roughly 1,147 distinct customers. Of those customers, 616 were new, better than half.
Read alone, a customer count is trivia. Read against your break-even count, it is the single most useful sentence in the morning: are we above the line today or below it. Read against the new-versus-returning split, it tells you which problem you actually have. A store starving for traffic and a store that cannot get anyone to come back look identical on a revenue chart and need completely opposite fixes.
What it gets you: you know where you stand against break-even every morning, and you stop guessing whether your marketing problem is acquisition or retention.
7. Units per basket, by hour
Store-wide we sold 2.24 items per transaction, and the busiest hour of the day was 6 p.m. The interesting part is what happens after that. The final hour of the night carries the deepest baskets in the store, about 2.56 items, and the smallest average ticket. Late customers buy more things, and cheaper things.
That one fact changes staffing, it changes what you put near the register at 8 p.m., and it changes which hour you schedule a bundle promotion into. None of it is visible in a daily sales total.
What it gets you: you stop treating every open hour as the same store, because it isn’t one.
The part we deliberately did not automate
Everything above is read-only. Our assistant can query the point-of-sale, count, compare, and recommend. It cannot change a price, edit a special, place an order, or publish anything. A human confirms before anything is written, and the publish button belongs to the owner.
That is a deliberate limit, not a missing feature. The failure mode for AI in a licensed business is not a bad recommendation, which you can ignore. It is a confident action taken against a regulated system at 2 a.m. with nobody watching. Reading is safe, and reading is where nearly all the value turned out to be anyway. Compliance questions belong with counsel; Cannabis Industry Lawyer is the right door for those, and this article is consulting perspective, not legal advice.
The stack itself is Roll It Up, which is what runs our own dispensary. We built it because we needed it. If you want the consulting side of this, that is what a cannabis consultant actually does.
Frequently asked questions about dispensary KPIs
What dispensary KPIs should I track every day?
Seven cover most of it: dead stock share, days of supply on your fastest movers, discount leakage as a percentage of gross, supplier license concentration, gross margin measured after discounts, customer count against break-even, and units per basket by hour. Weekly and monthly reporting can hold everything else.
How is discount leakage different from my promotions calendar?
The calendar shows what you configured. Leakage shows what actually rang up at the register, including loyalty redemptions, employee purchases, and manager overrides that appear on no calendar anywhere. When the two disagree, trust the register.
What counts as dead stock in a dispensary?
We treat any item with zero units sold in a 28-day window as dead, regardless of how it is flagged. That definition is stricter than most default reports, which usually classify anything under roughly 60 days of supply as healthy and quietly hide the true non-movers.
Is there a legal limit on how much I buy from one supplier?
Not in Illinois, and generally not elsewhere for retail purchasing, though rules vary by state and change often. Our own 35% ceiling is a self-imposed merchandising discipline, not a compliance requirement. Verify your state’s actual rules with your regulator before relying on any of this.
Do I need AI to track dispensary KPIs?
No. Every number here can be pulled by hand. The reason to automate is that a report requiring twenty minutes of exporting and pivoting gets run when there is time, and there is never time. The value is not the analysis; it is that the analysis arrives without anyone deciding to go get it.
Start with the two that hurt
If seven dispensary KPIs is too many to start with, start with two: what is frozen on your shelf, and what percentage of gross is leaving as discounts. Those two questions have found more money in more stores than the rest of the list combined, and you can answer both from data you already own.
Then bring the answers to somebody who has had to fix them. Talk to an owner who runs a dispensary on this — bring a question about your own store and get a real answer.
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