You started out selling your cannabis related products on COD.
Then your biggest customer said, “Put us on terms or we walk,” and just like that, you were extending credit and running a credit & collection department you never planned to build, with no shared payment data, no credit application process, and credit & collection management landing on whoever was closest to the invoices.
The credit & collection departments of corporate America know this, once you are in this position, you have two things to manage: your accounts receivable (AR) and the customers who owe you that AR.
The AR is straightforward. It’s money you are owed for your products and services. The customers are a different story, because there is a person at each customer responsible for paying you, and each one has a different personality.
Here are the customer personalities that show up in every industry I’ve ever worked with. In those industries, my clients had ample credit data to help them understand whom they were dealing with. The challenge in cannabis is that you have limited data to spot them.
The Steady Payer. Pays on time, every cycle. Feels safe, until the cycle, they don’t. That first late payment is the signal, not the exception.
The Forced Terms Customer. COD never generated any payment history on them, so the day you finally extend terms, there is no track record to review. COD protects your cash today, but it caps your growth.
The License Risk. Paying on time right now. But a compliance violation or a lapsed renewal tells you tomorrow’s story before your AR aging report ever will.
The Shelf Space Leverage Play. Controls enough retail space that shipping terms often get set by leverage, not by credit history. Leverage to get paid is not the same as being creditworthy. If a default happens, you’re an unsecured creditor in state receivership.
The Enterprise Buyer. Big, sophisticated, slow to pay by design, not by distress. Clean invoices and exact PO matching get you paid on schedule here.
None of this is about being a worse operator. It’s about making credit decisions without the payment and behavior data most industries have relied on for decades.
That is the gap we are trying to close at Reklaim Credit Solutions.
Know who won’t pay before they don’t pay. Reklaim your risk.