Keeping compliance paperwork with the products and orders it covers

The certificate that causes trouble is usually one you do have, sitting in a folder on the laptop of someone who left last spring. With cannabis packaging, the certificates and test reports need to be as easy to find as the product itself, and they need to follow it out the door.

Keep the document on the product

A certificate has an obvious home, which is the product it covers. The child-resistance report goes on the package it was tested on, closure and container together if that's how it was tested, and a cartridge's material or metals test goes on the cartridge. File it there once and anyone can find it later from the product, without having to remember who downloaded it or which email thread it came in on.

When someone asks for the papers on an order, say an inspector at your dock, send them everything for that order in one go, and keep a note of what you sent and when.

State rules come with dates

The other half is state packaging rules. A rule change usually comes with an effective date. Hearing about it a month early means changing the next order. Hearing a week late can mean relabeling what's already on the shelf.

Rules vary a lot from state to state and they do change, so treat anything here as general and check your state's current rules for what you sell.

Documents on products and orders

Certificates and test reports attach to the catalog products they cover, and a signed-in buyer sees them on the product page with their type and expiry date. Published documents download straight away. Some are listed as on request, which means the document exists but isn't published, often because it belongs to the supplier. You can ask for it from the same spot, and the page shows your request as pending until we answer.

For a purchase order, the compliance packet is a single ZIP download. The documents are grouped by what they cover (the catalog product, your item, the lot and the order itself), with a cover sheet filed under the state the goods are going to. Each download is recorded, cover sheet included, so if someone asks months later what you sent them in March, you can pull it up. If a document has changed since a packet went out, the packet page tells you.

You can file your own documents on your items with an expiry date, too. As one gets close to expiring you get an alert, and the alerts keep coming until a current replacement is on file.

State packaging rules are kept with their effective dates. A rule that hasn't taken effect yet shows as upcoming on your compliance check instead of staying hidden until the day it applies. When we add, switch off or remove a rule for a state where your business is based or has an active location, you get an alert. The check is a decision aid and not legal advice, and it only knows the rules we have on file, so it's still worth reading your state's own.