Data Entry Best Practices for Cannabis Master Growers

Let’s face it: data entry isn’t exciting, but it's an essential part of plant cultivation in the regulated cannabis market. In addition to capturing valuable information about your facility, data entry is a mandatory compliance requirement that keeps you in good standing with the government. 

However, data entry can be daunting, especially when dealing with large numbers of records, like in a licensed cannabis facility. 

We know that all you really want is to get back to your plants faster, so to help cannabis master growers streamline their data entry process, we have put together this article with our top tips for best data entry practices.

Whether you are a seasoned legacy grower or just starting out, these tips will help ensure the success of your cannabis cultivation endeavours and help get you back with your plants as quickly as possible.

Record Data in Real Time

In the fast-paced world of cannabis cultivation, data entry is a crucial task that often gets overlooked.

Recording data in real-time is crucial, ensuring that nothing falls through the cracks. Whether it's the number of clones you made, the date and time, the batch and location, the nutrients you fed your moms, or any other pertinent detail, it's important to have it all written down or logged into your seed-to-sale software as soon as possible. This not only helps you stay organized but also allows you to track and analyze your progress over time.

By telling yourself that you’ll get to it later, these important little details (often scribbled on a loose piece of paper) are easily forgotten, misplaced, or damaged, which can turn into a big pain in the butt down the line.

• Pro tip: You can use CertiCraft on a tablet in your grow rooms to input all your actions in real time. Our customers have told us it’s a real game-changer!
  
  

Make Sure You’re Tracking Everything the Government Requires

In the context of data entry best practices for cannabis master growers, meticulous record-keeping extends beyond personal organization—it's a key aspect of regulatory compliance.

When it comes to the Cannabis Regulations, a lot of data is required for audits, inspections, and monthly reports. For instance, despite how ridiculous it sounds, you’re expected to track the weight of the leaves you prune from plants that are going to be destroyed. Consistently tracking everything without missing critical details will make everything run much smoother, and your Quality Assurance team will appreciate you and have a much easier time producing reports and navigating audits.

To make things even easier, compliance-focused seed-to-sale software like CertiCraft prompts you to enter all the necessary regulatory requirements while using the platform. Our guided workflow makes it impossible to miss little details because the software won’t allow you to move to the next step without entering it. This guarantees that all the correct information has been entered into the system, so you can stay on top of your records with ease.

• Pro tip: Click here to learn more about preparing for a CRA inspection or here for Health Canada audits.

All Data Must be True and Correct

This may seem like a no-brainer, but a fundamental best practice for master growers is to ensure that all entries are not just recorded promptly but are also true and correct. The accuracy of your data forms the bedrock of informed decision-making and regulatory compliance.

In the heavily regulated environment of cannabis cultivation, misinformation can have far-reaching consequences, impacting everything from crop yield projections to the number of times you are audited. Meticulous attention to detail and verification processes should be ingrained in your data entry routine.

Regularly conducting internal audits and implementing validation checks are essential steps to guarantee the reliability of your data. CertiCraft makes this easy by simply not letting users proceed if they mistakenly enter impossible or illogical data. 

• Pro tip: it’s trivially easy to go back and correct mistakes using CertiFIX™, our audit-ready editing, backdating and deleting tool. 
  
  

Keep it Relevant  

Striking a balance between comprehensive documentation and avoiding unnecessary information is a best practice to implement with your data entry.

While detailed log notes can be invaluable for your internal team, you want to make sure that it’s really easy to pull out data the government wants later on. And if you’re never going to use some of the information you’re tracking, why are you collecting it?

When using CertiCraft, we only ask you for information critical to keeping you compliant, which significantly streamlines the data entry process for your entire team. We then take things further by automating the production of all the reports and records that you’ll need for not only government reports and audits but also all sorts of internal operational needs. 

• Pro tip: if your SOPs require you to track much more than is relevant and slowing you down, chat with your QAP to see if you can update that SOP to streamline things for you and the rest of the grow team. 
  
  

Conclusion

Data entry is a tedious but essential task for licensed cannabis cultivators and their grow teams. These best practices not only help save time and energy but also instill confidence in the quality assurance team (and by extension, government auditors) and foster a culture of accountability and excellence within the team.

By recording data in real-time, tracking audit information, ensuring all entries are true and correct, and keeping the information relevant, growers can streamline their data entry process, stay compliant, and optimize their cultivation operations.

And remember, CertiCraft can help you achieve all this and more with the simplest seed-to-sale platform on the market and the only one that was designed from the ground up to streamline compliance. Get in touch with us today to learn more!