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DOPE CFO We educate Accountants and Bookkeepers about how to enter the "green space".

10/21/2026

Somebody on one of our calls asked what a terpene actually is. Kristi got her start in this industry as a grower and a caregiver for cancer patients, so she gave an answer most finance people have never heard.

The way she explains it, essential oils are terpenes. The lavender oil on your nightstand is a terpene. So is the peppermint oil you rub on for a headache. And the scientific names for those scents, myrcene, limonene, beta caryophyllene, are the same compounds that give a cannabis plant its smell.

And then there's the system they act on. Your body has a cardiovascular system and a digestive system. It also has an endocannabinoid system, and Kristi describes that one as the conductor of the orchestra. It tells the other systems what tempo to play. The major cannabinoids, THC and C*D, are the key that turns the control board on. The terpenes and the minor cannabinoids, CBN, CBG and the rest, are the code that tells it what to do. So two plants with the same THC and C*D numbers can do very different things, because one is heavy on limonene and the other on caryophyllene. She'll tell you that's a big simplification, and it is, and it's still the right place to start.

And the product is not one product. Kristi puts the count at over a hundred and fifty cannabinoids identified so far, and even the conservative published reviews are north of a hundred and twenty. The geneticists are crossing strains to dial in a terpene profile for one condition or another, which is why she calls it almost a formulary science. We're not scientists and we don't pretend to be. But we do think a finance person who works in this industry ought to know what the product is, because operators can tell when somebody isn't really in the industry. They've dealt with plenty of bookkeepers and tax people who serve hundreds of other industries, and they don't like it.

Richard made the other half of the point on one of our calls. Most accountants sit behind the desk and wait to be found. So walk up to a grower and say, hey, what's in this batch, and you've already shown you care about their industry and you're not just making stuff up. These people love to talk about their products, and they love to teach you.

10/13/2026

Before a bank or credit union takes on a cannabis business, it does its own homework. What it's told to check is still FinCEN's 2014 guidance, FIN-2014-G001. GAO said this year it's the only federal guidance that specifically discusses the requirements, and it still rests on a Justice Department memo that was rescinded in 2018. The first few steps are about the license. The bank checks it with the state, and it asks the state about the business and the people behind it.

And a couple of lines on that list touch your books. The bank is supposed to understand the normal and expected activity for the business, and keep monitoring it. One of the red flags FinCEN lists is financial statements that don't match what's actually moving through the account.

Those banks are serving our clients. And Andrew hears the same thing from bankers over and over again. They do a little mini audit before they take on a cannabis client. And they come back with, hey, these books are wrecked, they need to clean up. The client wants a loan or a bank account, and the banks and lenders deal with this all day long.

The operators Shield Compliance surveyed this year are mostly happy with their bank. Credit is where it falls apart, and only five percent said it was readily available. In GAO's focus groups, operators described loan rates above fifteen percent. That's roughly double what a typical small business paid in early 2025. And the SAFE Banking bill that was filed again in June hasn't moved since.

So if the statements you hand a bank don't match the account, FinCEN's own list already calls that a red flag. And follow DOPE CFO for more on the money side of this industry.

10/01/2026

Outdoor growers harvest in October, and the industry has a name for what happens next, the Croptober flood. Supply hits the market all at once. Wholesale prices fall through the floor. And by the way, the trackers that follow wholesale prices put the October drop in double digits. A lot of that flower sits in a cure room waiting for a buyer.

Kristi has an accounting rule for it. In most of our old jobs, year end meant looking at inventory and asking whether it needed a markdown, as a matter of routine. It’s lower of cost or market, the way most of us learned it. In cannabis she won’t take the December price as the market number. Everything just hit the market on the first of the month, so of course the price is depressed. And if you mark the whole harvest down to three hundred dollars because that’s the December number, you’ve booked a loss the grower may never take. They can hold it and sell it later in the year. That December number isn’t the price they’re actually gonna get.

The farm has the same problem from the other end. Kristi’s own farm harvests in three sequential batches, because her dry room and cure room can’t hold the whole crop at once. If she tried, it would all mold. A cultivation consultant who joined one of our calls, fifteen years into growing, calls the fix butter knifing the harvest across the season. He uses auto flower genetics that finish early no matter the daylight, and a cheap hoop house when he needs to force a batch. And he picks a catalog of strains that land at different weeks, so the grower has product coming to market before and after the flood instead of in the middle of it.

And the financial model has to carry this too. One early grow Andrew worked with had a model that said, in effect, we’re gonna grow a buttload of w**d every year and sell it for insanely high prices forever. They were wrong on all three counts. And they never answered the question of who was buying it. So a real model runs a worst case price, an expected price, and a best case price. On that same farm Andrew’s team built a tool they still use, the Flower Calendar. It tells you, for every single plant, when it gets harvested, dried, cured, trimmed, and sold, and when the cash actually hits the bank.

So run three prices. And put every plant on a calendar before the first one comes down. That’s the schedule an investor wants to see.

09/24/2026

Cannabis/Hemp News Roundup Sept 2026

09/18/2026

Ray had already flown in. He had to eat, and he didn’t feel like going anywhere, so he went down to the hotel restaurant and sat at the bar. And somewhere in there he thought, why not invite somebody.

That was 2021, the year Kristi came back into the industry as an accountant. By her account nobody was doing pre-show networking nights back then. Ray just wanted to warm up the room a little. That way, when he walked onto the expo floor the next morning, he’d know a couple of faces.

So the two of them started doing it on purpose, getting people together at the hotel bar the night before an event. The first few times it was five or fourteen people, then it was twenty. And then all of a sudden it was a hundred, and somebody took the idea and ran with it. Now, in Kristi’s words, you can almost not go to a cannabis event without a kickoff night the evening before.

We’ve watched the same thing at a smaller scale. One year fifteen of our members got together the night before a show on the East Coast and threw a happy hour, and it drew a crowd. And Kristi’s own first attempt didn’t go like that at all.

When she was starting out she organized a cannabis meetup at a craft brewery in Fresno, an hour and twenty minutes down the mountain from her house. Five people said they’d come and nobody did. She’d put a little sign in the corner so people could find her. And a man sitting nearby noticed it and mentioned that the friend he was waiting for was a cannabis farmer. That turned into a real conversation with one of the biggest growers in California. It wasn’t the right client for her, and it still counted, because she’d put herself in the room. The next time she ran it, a few more people came.

And on one of our calls this month a brand new member, on her very first day with us, did the same math in about a minute. She has a friend of thirteen years who farms and can’t seem to meet the other farmers around him. And her answer was, great, I’ll come up there and host a happy hour, and that gets him connections and it gets me connections. She hadn’t touched a logo or a website. She went straight to the thing that matters, which is talking to owners.

Every Cannabis Chamber of Commerce branch and every NORML chapter started with one person asking whether they could organize something in their area. And cannabis owners love a happy hour. So if the show you’re heading to this fall has no kickoff night on the schedule, host one. Tag us when you post it, and we’ll re-share it.

09/03/2026

There’s a craft farmer who just got hired to run a cannabis company. And years ago, when she was still growing on a small farm, she met Kristi from our team at the Emerald Cup. It was the first event Kristi went to when she came back into cannabis, and Kristi just vibed with her, two women in the industry trying to make it and trying to uplift each other. And the farm was too small to ever afford Kristi’s services. Kristi knew it, and it would have been easy to look at a small craft grower and think, too small, who cares, and plenty of people would have.

They stayed in contact instead, and over the years they became real friends. The farmer has been a guest on our podcast a couple of times. When she hosted a summit, she called Kristi and said, come be a speaker. When one of Kristi’s clients needed a consultant, Kristi told them, you should look at her. They’ve done projects together and served some of the same businesses from different sides, so she’s seen Kristi’s work up close, and along the way she’s sent half a dozen people Kristi’s way. Kristi has a phrase for the arrangement. They give each other opportunities when they see them, and they speak each other’s names in rooms when the other one isn’t there.

And Kristi teaches this now with a distinction she drew on one of our calls. Some things are fast leads, and some things are slower leads. The fast ones are what everyone walks into an event hoping for, the operator with a problem and a budget who wants a call next week, and you absolutely take those. But if you measure every conversation by whether it turns into business, the slower ones start to look like wasted afternoons. This whole story is a slower lead. A farmer who could never hire anybody turned into referrals, a speaking slot, a friendship, and years of working alongside each other, and Kristi never billed her once.

Meeting someone and starting the relationship is valuable in and of itself. That was true the day they met, when there was nothing to show for it, and it stayed true for years while there still wasn’t much. And now the small farmer from that first event is running a cannabis company, and the relationship keeps going.

08/28/2026

Canna News Roundup Aug 2026

08/28/2026

Kristi got her start in this industry growing cannabis, and these days she coaches our members on serving clients. And when somebody new wants to understand cultivation, her favorite thing to hand them is an album. Mendo Dope, two brothers out of Mendocino County, recorded music that follows the whole grow, and Kristi tells people you can learn everything there is to know about a plant by listening to a reggae album. She means it, too. The record really does run from seed to harvest.

That came up again on one of our calls. A member who’s new to cannabis had found one of those hundred and fifty dollar online cannabis trainings and asked us whether it was worth buying. In her own words, she doesn’t know anything about cannabis yet.

Before you go deep on the tax side, learn the plant. That’s the answer, and it’s how the education we give our own community works. It starts with the science of the plant, then the products, the brands, the software, the verticals, and then the accounting. And you don’t need to memorize strains, because the high-level picture comes first and the details come with the work.

There’s a practical reason we take this seriously. One of the big point-of-sale companies in cannabis publishes a glossary with over two hundred industry terms in it. And that’s the working vocabulary you’re gonna hear from the owners and growers and budtenders our members sit across from. When the person handling the money has heard those terms before, they can stay calm, cool, and collected in the conversation instead of freezing up because they don’t know what half the words mean.

And the learning never stops. Our members learn on the weekly calls, and they keep learning at events and inside the organizations they join. And one of them just got handed a reggae album.

08/24/2026

There was a cannabis meetup in Bend, Oregon a couple of weeks ago. And that’s the thing about this industry: there’s something like it going on in all fifty states, because cannabis has events and organizations and a whole movement behind it, and it’s almost impossible not to get involved. There are state association meetups and awards nights coming up this fall in your state and probably in your city, and there’s usually some little happy hour afterwards where the conversations keep going.

And then there’s the big one. MJBizCon runs December 1 through 4 in Las Vegas, and it’s the biggest cannabis event in the world. We tell our own community it’s not a must go, but it’s something to go to at least once in your first two or three years, because it’s quite a show. And by the way, it’s a ton of fun. It’s definitely a vacation.

There are usually thirty or forty people from our network walking that floor. Kristi and Ray are there every year, and she’s already posting about it in our community, discount code and all. Andrew’s going this year, and Richard is flying in all the way from Malta. Somewhere in the middle of it we’ll be throwing a little happy hour or whatever.

So here’s our ask for the fall. Pick one thing near you and go. You don’t need a booth or a badge or a reason, and you definitely don’t need to feel ready. You show up, you walk over to two people and say, hey, what do you guys do, and sometimes that’s all it takes. And if the one thing you pick is Vegas in December, come find us and say hi.

08/11/2026

We had a cannabis tax attorney on our guest call last week, and he told us about a client of his, a vertically integrated California operator, where he went back through four years of state returns and found about a million dollars in research and development credits. Somewhere around $200,000 to $250,000 a year. And the company didn’t spend a dime of new money to get it. He was reclassifying dollars they’d already spent on growing and processing.

Everyone’s watching the federal side right now, and meanwhile a handful of states went their own way years ago. California decoupled from 280E back in 2019, so licensed cannabis businesses there deduct expenses on their state return like any other company, and the state R&D credit is open to them. And our guest likes New Mexico even better in some ways, because they’ll count certain property spend toward the credit that other states won’t touch.

And by the way, research doesn’t mean lab coats and patents. The bar he kept coming back to is that the work has to be new to your company, not new to the world. So a grower dialing in yields batch after batch can qualify, and so can a processor figuring out how to make a product hold up on the shelf longer, or a manufacturer that used to get a hundred units an hour off the line and got it to two fifty. And if your team has emails and spreadsheets flying back and forth trying to crack a problem like that, that’s your documentation right there.

He told us the reason he loves this corner of tax is he gets to be the bearer of good news for once, in an industry that’s used to getting the other kind.

So if you own a cultivation or processing operation, ask whoever does your numbers one question: hey, have we ever looked at R&D credits? Our guest’s experience is that ninety nine percent of the time, the answer is, what’s that? And the worst thing that can happen is you find out there’s nothing there.

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