As a district manager for cannabis dispensaries, you have a lot on your hands – confirming all locations comply with tricky state and federal regulations, keeping all teams working efficiently, reinforcing brand standards, and solving problems before they become disasters. If you’re still relying on paper audits or spreadsheets for site visits and haven’t yet explored how digital field audits can help you run efficient, compliant operations while growing your business, now’s the time to find out.
Here’s what digital audits can do for you:
- Save time collecting and compiling store compliance data
- Increase accuracy of audits
- Save time preparing for regulatory audits
- Improve employee performance
- Reinforce brand standards to attract more customers
- Capture business insights for growth
Shorten the Audit Process
If you’re currently jotting audit notes on paper or typing them into a document, digital audit apps save you tons of time and effort. They present forms on a mobile device you can fill out with a few clicks. Quickly add photos or videos to provide extra detail you could never include with hand-entered descriptions. Plus, you can access any audit checklist from the device, so you never have to run back to the head office for a paper form you forgot to pick up.
With digital audits, you can skip the hours of copying notes into a spreadsheet and typing up reports. The data is pushed to the cloud a soon as you enter it. The application turns audit details into instant reports and dashboards for a single location, a region, or the entire company.
With digital audits, field managers no longer need to travel onsite for every report. While there are times it makes sense to be at the location, sometime schedules or outside circumstances make personal visits difficult. Digital audits can be conducted by store managers who access the software on their mobile devices. Photos, videos, and notes ensure the audit is objective and accurate. And field managers receive the results immediately so they can spot any problems and address them quickly.
Improve Audit Accuracy
If you have to compile stacks of audit forms into a report or spreadsheet, you spend hours copying results from one format to another, increasing the likelihood of typos and mistakes. If the notes are handwritten, it’s easy to misread the script and enter the wrong comment.
Audit notes are also famously thin on details. People don’t have the time to include long, specific comments for each item, and they may omit crucial details by accident. Photos help add clarity and increase accuracy, but it’s time-consuming to upload photos from a phone to a computer and match them with the right audit item for the report. With digital audit apps, you can snap a photo or video, and it’s automatically attached and uploaded to the cloud.
Finally, if you need to make changes to your audit checklist and you’re still using manual forms, you’ll have to update the forms, distribute them to the team and follow up to make sure everyone is using the right version. It’s easy for people to get confused and use the wrong form, invalidating your results. However, with a digital audit, you can update the interface and push the change to everyone on your team instantly. So, you know everyone is using the right form and the correct data is being collected at all times.
Simplify Regulatory Audits
Your dispensary must operate within strict regulatory guidelines. And when you get audited, it can be tough to pull together all the information you need to prove compliance. But with a digital audit app, you have regular compliance data stretching back over time. And because it’s stored on the cloud, you can easily pull what you need for an audit without the usual hassle.
Standardize Employee Excellence
Digital audits ensure every field manager or district manager is using the same standards to evaluate each location. If there’s any infraction, you can create and deliver a plan to correct the problem in the audit software. Assign responsibility to the location manager, and the app tracks progress and completion so you know everything is done right.
When it comes to correcting problems, you can’t afford to wait. But with manual audits, by the time the information is compiled into reports, it’s two or three weeks out of date. Digital audits share results right away so you can repair compliance problems long before they cause damage to your brand or business.
Differentiate Your Brand
Because digital audit apps foster a culture of high and consistent standards, you can separate your dispensaries from the crowd. Use audit apps to confirm that employees are adding the extra customer service touches that shoppers remember. Correlate detailed performance data with revenue to uncover what encourages people to buy. Or, examine how high-volume locations are attracting buyers and replicate their approach at all locations, using the audit apps to record progress.
Capture Insights That Help Grow Your Business
As you compile more information about how each store is performing, a digital audit application will show you ways to grow the business. For example, you can set a benchmark for the minimum acceptable performance. The data will tell you as soon as a store falls below that benchmark. You’ll know exactly what you need to address to bring everyone back in step and keep revenue flowing in.
You can also test out new procedures to see if they make a difference. If you implement an updated policy, for example, compare audit results before and after the change, then correlate those numbers with labor costs and revenue to determine how well the new policy works. With accurate data driving business decisions, you quickly filter out inefficiencies and ramp up growth.
Explore the Advantages of MeazureUp’s AuditApp
With MeazureUp’s digital audit application, your field audits become a powerful (and highly visible) business tool. Capture compliance and performance data fast with reliable, detailed entries, date and time stamps, location tracking, photos, and videos.
Customize audit checklists to include your unique brand standards so your dispensaries stand out in the market. And with an unlimited user model, you can expand from audits to daily checklists for every employee. When your entire team is working to keep your stores compliant and consistently following procedures, you spend more time growing your business and cultivating success.
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