LeafLink + cannabis vendor invoices — kill manual entry

The retyping pattern looks small per-invoice (15-30 minutes for an average 20-line cannabis order) but compounds. A multi-vendor week is 4-6 invoices; a typical dispensary running 20 vendors hits 60-100 invoices/month. At 20 minutes per invoice = 20-33 hours/month of typing that nobody enjoys + nobody verifies because verification is also manual.

• **Time** — at $25/hr loaded, 25 hrs/month = $7,500/yr in pure-overhead labor.
• **Errors** — typos drift cost-basis. A SKU with cost typed as $12.50 instead of $1.25 mis-prices margin reports for weeks until someone notices.
• **Latency** — the time between vendor-ships-it and POS-knows-it-arrived determines when reorder math triggers. If invoices land Tuesday but get typed Thursday, your reorder algorithm is operating with 2-day-stale data.
• **Reconciliation** — bookkeeper has to match invoice → PO → received → AP. Each disconnect is a question the bookkeeper asks the buyer.

LeafLink offers an order-mirror API for licensed retailers. The mechanic: you authorize the integration, the platform receives a webhook (or polls) on order confirmation, and a draft PO appears in your POS that’s already line-matched to your product catalog. The receiving team scans incoming product, confirms quantities, and posts. No retyping.

1. 1**Authorize once.** OAuth handshake or API key (operator-controlled). Stored encrypted in the platform’s env vars; rotates per LeafLink’s rotation cadence.
2. 2**Catalog match runs nightly.** Your product catalog gets matched to LeafLink’s SKUs by EAN + brand-alias + name fuzzy-match. New unmatched products surface in an admin queue for one-click approval.
3. 3**Order confirms → draft PO appears.** Within ~5 minutes of you confirming an order in LeafLink, the corresponding draft PO is in your POS, line-matched, with vendor name + delivery date + cost-basis pre-filled.
4. 4**Receiving team confirms.** Shipment arrives, team scans product, marks confirmed. Variances (short-shipped, damaged) flag for buyer review.
5. 5**Posted PO flows to inventory + cost-basis.** No re-entry. The cost-basis update propagates to per-product cost in real-time.

Cannabis vendors are frequently spelled multiple ways across LeafLink, your catalog, and supplier emails. Northwest Cannabis Solutions / NWCS / NW Cannabis. Without an alias map, the matcher fails to dedup and your buyer sees 'NWCS' as 3 different vendors. Then the auto-PO splits across them. Then everything breaks.

• Maintain an aliases column on the vendors table — every accepted spelling for that vendor.
• Match runs LOWER + TRIM on both sides — ‘NWCS ’ matches ‘nwcs’ matches ‘NWCS’.
• When a new spelling appears, surface it for admin approval — don’t auto-match (false positives are painful).
• Refresh aliases quarterly — vendors rebrand, merge, change DBAs. Stale aliases break matching silently.

LeafLink’s data is rich. Some of it shouldn’t auto-flow into your POS without human review.

• **Don’t auto-receive.** The PO appears as a draft. The receiving team has to scan + confirm. Auto-receive would let an unrelated shipment update your inventory.
• **Don’t auto-update sale price.** Cost-basis flows through; sale price is a margin-decision the operator makes. The product catalog should retain the existing retail price until someone updates it.
• **Don’t auto-create new products.** A new SKU on LeafLink is a buying decision. Surface it for the buyer to confirm + categorize before it lands in the catalog.
• **Don’t auto-pay.** Invoice→AP→bank-payment is the bookkeeper’s job. Auto-paying invoices is how you get the inevitable double-pay or wrong-vendor-pay error.

• **WSLCB lab-test 5% passthrough (WAC 314-55-079)** — the cost-basis update has to handle the lab-test surcharge correctly. LeafLink’s line price may or may not include the test fee depending on the producer; the matcher needs to know which side computes it.
• **METRC tag chain-of-custody** — LeafLink integrations sometimes carry the METRC package id; sometimes don’t. If the tag isn’t in the LeafLink payload, receiving still has to scan the manifest tag separately. The mirror doesn’t replace the manifest workflow — it co-exists with it.
• **Allocation-period skew** — during recreational allocation cycles, LeafLink prices can shift hour-to-hour. The draft PO should snapshot the price at order-confirm time, not poll for live updates after.
• **Vendor terms (Net-X) on the AP side** — payment terms (Net-30, Net-60) live in the vendor master, not the LeafLink payload. The bookkeeper’s aging report has to know — and only the vendor master tells it.