There is no doubt that 4/20 is the largest sales day of the year for any dispensary. Beyond raw revenue, do you know how effective you are at generating a profit on 4/20? Customers come expecting great deals, but that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t expect to make the same, if not better, from the event. Here are metrics to track to make sure you are getting the most out of your 4/20 dispensary performance. 

Transaction count: How many total tickets / receipts did you pull in? You expect to pull in a higher number of tickets, but knowing the exact amount will help you determine the rate they came in, like how many came in per hour throughout the day. You can also use this to calculate customers per budtender, which will help you more accurately plan labor for future high-volume events. 

Transactions per labor hour: Dispensaries will staff up to handle a surge of customers on 4/20. But how do you make sure you are staffing enough, or not over staffing? Tracking your customers per labor hours will help you compare 4/20 to non-4/20 days. To calculate customers per labor hours:

• Take the total number of hours worked from every employee scheduled and sum them for any given day (Total Labor)
• Find the total number of transactions for the day or time period (Transactions)
• (Total labor) / (Transactions)

There is no “correct” ratio, but when comparing 4/20 vs other days, a higher value for transactions per labor hour means your staff was handling a lower volume of transactions, and a higher number means they were handling many more transactions per labor hour. Tracking this historically can help you really fine-tune your labor and staffing by ensuring you don’t keep customers waiting due to understaffing but don’t stress out your budtenders

Average margin: You should already be tracking margin, but your average margin per transaction is key to knowing just how successful your day has been. Average margin along with total revenue tells you not only how “good” of a day you had, but just how effective you were at offing deals and promotions that encouraged people to still purchase items beyond the major discounts. 

Regardless of your dispensary’s goals for 4/20, whether its just bringing in new customers, rewarding your loyal customers, or something else, tracking the above metrics are important on all days, not just 4/20. They can give you the basic tools to understand your financial performance and fine-tune labor costs. Appature makes this simple and easy using all of your historical retail transaction data, automatically calculating the performance from each 4/20 event! Hope you have a successful and productive 4/20. Thanks and happy reporting!