Tracking discounts without the spreadsheet headache

In cannabis retail, high sell-through looks great... until you realize you paid for it in discounts.

Discounting is everywhere. From weekly promos to loyalty perks, brands and retailers alike throw discounts at products to keep velocity high. But how do you track what it’s actually costing you?

What’s the Problem?

Tracking discounts across the various channels, some of which are compounding, is a serious bear. It's time-consuming. It’s error-prone. And it’s hiding real margin leakage.

Retailers typically forecast off of keystone margins, or 50%. What happens to your pro formas or profit forecasts if untracked or miscalculated discount amounts reduce that keystone down to 30 or even 20%?

That’s the leakage, and it’s crippling retailers around the country.

Cash flow is the only thing that matters in today’s cannabis market. The companies without cash flow cannot survive, let alone grow. Cash is the whole castle, not just the king. Or queen. Or nonbinary monarch of your choosing.

This means discount tracking is crucial. Doing it accurately, however, is next to impossible.

Most Retailers’ Solution: Untangling Christmas Lights (in Spreadsheets)

The process, for most retailers today, is painfully familiar:

Export your line item sales report, dig through thousands of rows, manually calculate what each discount shaved off, then try to match it back to brands or products in a separate spreadsheet. 

Right now, cannabis buyers are practically flying blind when it comes to promo results. A product that looks like a top performer might actually be a top discounter, eroding your margins while inflating your numbers.

Even worse, there’s no clean way to attribute discounts back to brands for support or reimbursement. Buyers are currently stuck reverse-engineering results with spreadsheets that don’t tell the full story.

We’ve seen it firsthand. Teams spend hours exporting, filtering, and calculating just to figure out how much they gave up in revenue last month and where. It's one of the most tedious spreadsheet tasks in cannabis buying today.

So we shredded it.

Our Solution: Discounts Tracked in Happy Buyers

We've added new columns to the Inventory Health and All Products pages in Happy Buyers:
Avg Discount % and Discount $

Track your average discount rate and total dollars by store, brand, or product

• Identify your most heavily discounted SKUs
• Understand if high sales were powered by smart marketing or deep cuts
• Model margin recovery scenarios by reducing discount %

Let’s say a product sells for $10 and you run a 20% promo. Happy Buyers logs that $2 as Discount $.

That means you:

• Know exactly how much revenue was lost to discounts
• Can estimate brand support and reimbursement more accurately
• Can connect discounting directly to sell-through, not just unit velocity
• Can stop wasting hours doing math in Excel

This is real visibility into promo costs. Not buried in reports. Not split across tabs. And definitely not lost in a pivot table.

Used together, Discount $ and % give cannabis buyers a new lens on performance. One that adds real profit context to every product on the shelf.

High velocity doesn’t always mean high performance

Let’s say a gummy moves 15 units per day. Looks great, right?

But then you notice $300 in Discount $ behind that movement last month.

With Happy Buyers, you’ll know the real cost of that velocity. And you’ll be ready to decide if it was worth it.

Stop crunching promo math in spreadsheets. Start seeing your true performance.

 👉 Try Happy Buyers free and track discount dollars instantly.

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