Excel Will Never Fix Your Inventory Problems

And Tableau? That’s just Excel with a fancier job title.

If you think your retail cannabis operation is ahead of the game because you’ve got a slick spreadsheet or a Tableau dashboard, we’re sorry to say that you aren’t.

Every cannabis retailer we talk to says the same thing:

“We’ve got a pretty advanced spreadsheet we use for buying.”
Or:
“We actually just implemented PowerBI that handles a lot of this.”

And then they show us something that looks exactly like the hundreds of spreadsheets sitting on our desktop from other retailers that have switched to Happy Buyers.

Let us be very clear:
Your spreadsheet isn’t solving your inventory problems. It's a band aid when you need surgery.

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Your Inventory System Isn’t a System, It’s a One-Person Magic Trick

Maybe you’ve got someone internally who’s amazing with Excel. They’ve built cascading formulas, lookup tables, pivot tables, slick reports. Maybe you’ve hired consultants who are customizing Tableau or PowerBI to make it look sexy.

But what happens when that person leaves?

Or when your POS changes?

Or the vendor sheet format updates?
Or the formulas break?
Or your store count doubles and the whole thing can’t scale?

You don’t have an automated inventory system.
You have a spreadsheet. And eventually, the inaccuracies of that spreadsheet pile up to over $150k per store in excess inventory.

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The Real Cost of “Doing It Yourself”

Building internal tools feels cheaper at first. But maintaining your custom reports, updating dashboards, troubleshooting broken formulas, interpreting results across multiple stores—all of it takes serious time and people.

Your spreadsheet can’t possibly capture:

• Sell through based on in and out of stock movement
• Hourly movement of inventory across multiple locations and dozens of inventory rooms
• Substitutions of rotational SKUs and products
• Auto-updating as new products come in

That lack of nuance leads to inaccurate orders and consistent oversupply for shops relying on Excel or Tableau.

And that's before you layer in the headcount costs of the daily spreadsheet management required. Thousands of dollars spent updating formulas and pasting from POS reports, all to generate inaccurate orders.

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Our Only Competition Is Excel, and We’re Winning

Happy Buyers is the only tool on the market made specifically for cannabis inventory purchasing. It’s built by data nerds (like us) so you can focus on what you do best.

We’ve replaced those “advanced spreadsheets” at hundreds of retail stores.

We helped them go from months of oversupply to lean, strategic ordering with under 30 days of inventory on hand.

And yes, we did it faster, cheaper, and with fewer headaches than any internal tool ever could.

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You Don’t Need More Dashboards.

You Need a Purpose-Built Platform.

Your job is not to build software. It’s not to manage analysts. It’s not to reverse-engineer your POS just to figure out what to order this week.

That’s our job. We’ve already built it and we’ll keep updating it as the market, your POS, and your inventory needs evolve.

So yeah, we get it: your spreadsheet is nice.
But it’s not the solution.
It’s the problem pretending to be the solution.

Ready to ditch the dashboard trap?
Let’s talk. We'll show you what an actual inventory system looks like, no formulas required.

Test drive it free for 14 days using your live store data, and start saving money before you’re even spending it!

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