How BatchNav Captures All Cannabis Manufacturing Costs

One of the biggest challenges in cannabis is knowing your true costs. Spreadsheets, seed-to-sale, and ERP-lite systems may capture pieces of the picture — usually direct labor or materials — but they fail to account for all costs, especially overhead.

BatchNav was built to solve this problem. By breaking cannabis operations into cost centers and tying every expense back to either a process stage or a batch lot, BatchNav ensures full absorption costing across your entire facility.

The 10 Cost Centers

BatchNav organizes operations into 10 functional cost centers:

  • 9 process stages: Mothercare, Propagation, Vegetation, Flower, Dry Process, Lab Process, Kitchen, Packaging, Vault
  • 1 overhead center: Admin

This framework ensures every expense — whether direct labor, packaging material, or utility bill — is captured as close to the point of use as possible.

Direct Cost Capture

BatchNav tracks direct costs (labor, materials, and machine time) at the batch lot level through resource bills:

  • Bills of Material & Labor: Executed when a batch changes item type (e.g., Flower → Harvest Weight).
  • Task Bills: Created for tasks (e.g., repotting, pruning) and executed when the task runs.
  • Labor Tracker: Captures all payroll hours, including admin, meetings, and management time. Direct labor already applied to a batch is automatically subtracted to avoid double counting.

Result: direct labor and materials are attached to the specific batch that consumed them.

Indirect Cost Capture

Not all overhead costs are known in real time (e.g., utilities, security, facility services). BatchNav solves this with its period reconciliation process:

  • Unallocated costs at the cost center level are pooled daily.
  • At period close, these costs are allocated back to all batches active in that cost center on that day.
  • Costs are spread evenly across batch units, ensuring every WIP, bulk, or finished good absorbs its share.

Once a period is closed, costs are frozen. Adjustments apply in the next period — keeping reporting clear and audit-ready.

Supplier & Customer Invoices

Accurate costing starts with accurate purchasing. BatchNav:

  • Captures invoice line items at fully landed costs (absorbing the entire invoice cost).
  • Tracks costs using the FIFO method to accurately capture price changes.
  • Provides 3-way matching (supplier invoice, sales order, packing slip).
  • Is not a payment system — invoices still flow to the accounting system for processing and payment.

For sales, BatchNav can generate customer invoices, but it does not manage collections or receivables. Instead, it can automatically email sales invoices to the A/R team. Similarly, A/P can email supplier purchase invoices into BatchNav for processing.

This separation ensures BatchNav stays focused on cost accuracy and batch visibility, while your accounting system manages payments and collections.

Why This Matters

Most cannabis systems leave operators with incomplete costing:

  • Direct materials are tracked, but labor and overhead are ignored.
  • Overhead is either left out or guessed at with arbitrary percentages.
  • Invoices float between departments, with no direct tie to operations.

BatchNav closes these gaps:

  • All costs are captured — direct and indirect, batch and overhead.
  • No double counting — reconciliation ensures accuracy.
  • Audit-ready clarity — costs are frozen at close and tied back to batches.
  • Seamless invoice handling — fully landed costs flow directly into your cost centers.

The Bottom Line

BatchNav isn’t just another inventory tool. It’s the only cannabis system designed for full absorption costing, tying every dollar of labor, materials, and overhead back to the batches that consumed them.