How The Cannabist Company Cut Reporting from Days to Minutes With Planful

The Cannabist Company quickly outgrew its spreadsheet-dependent processes and patchwork of in-house and third-party tools as the business expanded. Despite its complexity, the team implemented Planful in just a few weeks—proving that lengthy, expensive setups aren’t required to see value. They’ve since shortened financial cycle times and now provide timely, data-driven insights that help business leaders act with confidence.

Like many fast-growing organizations, The Cannabist Company reached a breaking point with manual, spreadsheet-driven processes. For years, finance relied on Excel for budgeting, reporting, and consolidations, until it became impossible to keep up.

“In our industry’s early days, solutions were hard to find,” recalled Ethan Harrington, the company’s VP of Finance. “That forced everyone into spreadsheets, homegrown systems, or a hodgepodge of both. For us, it was Excel, Excel, Excel – and Excel is great, until it breaks. Plus, you can’t audit Excel or see who made changes.”

The team’s growing complexity only made the problems worse. With multiple acquisitions and vertically integrated operations, finance was bogged down by:

• Weeks spent consolidating disconnected data from multiple systems.
• Manual reporting and budgeting consumed days of work every week.
• No visibility or control across reports, and no audit trail to track who made changes and where.
• Time-consuming downloads from the company’s point-of-sale system every week.

“We were struggling,” Ethan continued. “Trying to report upwards, budgeting challenges, data inefficiencies – it was brutal. It was obvious that change needed to happen quickly.”

At the same time, the team was up against a hard deadline to transition off their legacy system. With that change approaching, finance needed a reliable solution that could be implemented quickly and without compromise on capabilities.

The Cannabist Company wasted no time modernizing its financial processes. With support from implementation partner Bakerfield Solutions, the team prioritized immediate needs—starting with reporting and dashboards—and set an ambitious goal: to be fully operational in Planful within weeks.

“We instantly had a great connection with both the Planful and Bakerfield teams,” said Ethan. “Planful grasped what we needed and even pushed us to think beyond what we were asking for. And Bakerfield has been fantastic throughout implementation, working with us every step of the way and helping us shape an even better product than we initially imagined.”

The team took a phased approach—launching reporting and dashboards first, then expanding into budgeting and forecasting. Bakerfield’s team moved quickly, focusing on the essentials and delivering value within weeks.

“They knew our deadline for transitioning off the other system and made sure to beat it,” Ethan recalled. “We were reporting out of Planful within three or four weeks, which was awesome.”

In that short time, Planful became the foundation for a faster, more connected finance organization:

• Reporting and dashboards delivered self-service insights across Finance and Operations.
• Planful Spotlight for Microsoft 365 made the move from Excel effortless, allowing teams to build reports in Excel, Word, and PowerPoint while pulling live data directly from Planful’s single source of truth.
• Dynamic, one-click updates ensured every report reflected the latest numbers instantly.

Planful made it easy to move away from legacy spreadsheet dependencies without taking away the tools that everyone is most familiar with.

“To us, Spotlight has been an extremely nimble tool,” said Ethan. “It’s an easy plug-in to Excel, and it grabs your data from Planful magically, at the click of a button. We can build reports that look and feel just like what Operations, Finance, and the CFO are used to, and update them immediately.”

With Planful, The Cannabist Company transformed its financial performance management processes. By consolidating data from a patchwork of back-office systems and spreadsheets, the team has eliminated days of manual effort each week. This streamlined reporting and dashboarding while creating a stronger foundation for budgeting and forecasting.

“It’s hard to count how many hours Planful has saved us,” said Ethan. “We’re doing tasks at the click of a button that individual workers used to spend a day or two on every single week. I’m not exaggerating—it’s tens and tens of hours every week.”

Within just the first month, Ethan and his team were already seeing measurable results:

• Days of effort cut from finance workflows. “Within the first month on Planful, we were saving tens of hours a week.”
  45 minutes from close to executive dashboards. “As soon as the books close, within forty-five minutes, I can share dashboards with the executive team—it’s awesome.”
• Forecasting reduced from a week to minutes. “Things that used to take an analyst a week to forecast out, we’re now doing in minutes or hours.”
• Cross-functional visibility and control. “Finance, Accounting, and Ops are all in Planful now. I can see who’s doing what, they can share their work quickly, and we have a full audit trail.”
• Greater accuracy and trust in data. “A big benefit has been accuracy in reporting and forecasting. Because we’ve saved so many hours, we can spend more time making sure the numbers are right.”
• More time for high-value work. “Planful lifts my employees out of the grind—they can finally do what analysts really should be doing.”
• Greater visibility, control, and auditability. “It’s not just the time savings—it’s the control. I can see who’s doing the work, they can share updates quickly, and we have a full audit trail. It’s awesome.”

Ethan also highlighted the enthusiasm across leadership. “Everyone loves Planful,” he said. “Our CFO and COO love the speed at which we can publish reports and show what the last month or quarter looked like.”

And the finance team isn’t stopping there. With automation, auditability, and collaboration built into their daily workflows, they’re now exploring what else Planful can streamline next.

“Now we’re asking, ‘What can Planful help us do that we’ve never been able to do before?’” Ethan added. “I would absolutely recommend Planful. It’s certainly making our lives a lot easier.”