Ten weeks after the NMS2S cutover: the year-end inventory audit every New Mexico retailer should run

New Mexico's retailers lost the BioTrack baseline on September 4. Many spent the autumn getting product sellable again. The year-end question is different: does NMS2S, your POS and your shelf agree, and can you show how they got there?

What happened in September, briefly

The state moved every licensee from BioTrack to the New Mexico Seed-to-Sale System (NMS2S), built by Real Time Solutions. Retailers had a few days with both systems before BioTrack shut down. The first week went badly for many stores:

• Items did not migrate. The New Mexico Cannabis Association said one retailer had roughly 50,000 items fail to transfer from BioTrack.
• Products were miscategorised. Reported cases included $150,000 of a retailer's top seller labelled as a different product, and $460,000 of product miscategorised at a larger retailer, all unsellable until fixed.
• BioTrack failed during the handover. Reports say it crashed and did not properly add inventory to NMS2S.
• Test results had to be re-entered. Retailers said results for transferred products must be entered manually, which raised accuracy and trust concerns.
• Taxes stayed manual. Operators pointed out that calculating taxes by hand creates its own exposure.

Most stores have since made their inventory sellable. What is less certain is whether the fixes were complete and whether they are documented. That is what a year-end audit is for.

What is probably still wrong

These are the fields the migration touched. Errors in them often do not stop a sale, so they survive:

Our migration-fix checklist covers the original correction order. The audit below checks that the corrections held.

The five-step year-end audit

1. Freeze one moment

Pick a closing time. At that time, export the NMS2S inventory, export the POS inventory and stop moving stock. Count against those two exports, not against live screens. Variances measured at different moments are not variances.

2. Match by identifier, then count

Match NMS2S to the POS by item ID first. Three lists come out:

• In both: compare quantities, then weights.
• In NMS2S only: usually stock still in an inventory room or under a duplicate item.
• In the POS only: usually a POS item mapped to a retired or wrong NMS2S item.

Then count the shelf, room by room, against the matched list.

3. Check the migrated fields on every sale-ready item

For each item on the Sales Floor: expiry date against the packaging or COA, product type against what it is, weight or volume per unit filled in, test result attached and matching. Do the highest-value products first; the reported losses show where mistakes cost most.

4. Tie sales to tax, month by month

For September through December: NMS2S sales, POS sales, and the tax filed should tell the same story. Where they don't, find the cause (late-reported sales during the handover window, voids, items sold under the wrong type) and write it down.

5. Write the record

For every correction made since September and every variance found now: item, field, old value, new value, who, when and why. Keep the BioTrack-era POS export you used as your baseline with it. This record is the evidence that a figure was corrected, not changed to make a number fit, and it is the starting point for the first monthly reconciliation of 2027 under 16.8.2.40 NMAC.

Why it is worth doing now

• Year-end books. Inventory value at December 31 drives cost of goods sold. A miscategorised or mis-weighed item is a cost error as well as a compliance one.
• Insurance. Insurers look at inventory records when they assess a loss. A gram short on paper is hard to explain if no one recorded the migration fix that caused it.
• Inspection. An inspector comparing NMS2S to the shelf will find what you didn't. A dated record of what you found and fixed reads very differently from an unexplained gap.
• The API is still limited. As of the cutover, NMS2S launched without API support for several inventory workflows, so many corrections stay manual in the web app. Doing them once, carefully, in a quiet week beats doing them under pressure.

How BudAlly helps

BudAlly reads the POS and the NMS2S record into one package-level ledger and reconciles them daily. For a year-end audit that gives you the three lists in step 2 without spreadsheet matching, and every correction lands in its audit trail with who, when and why. Where NMS2S has no write surface, each fix becomes a task: "done in NMS2S, confirm". Start with the NMS2S hub or start with a free audit: connect read-only and get a package-level variance report.

Figures above are as reported by the sources listed; they describe individual businesses, not the whole market.