HeadQuarters gets cannabis out of spreadsheet jail.

The invoice has been sent. That sounds like the end of something. For HeadQuarters, it is the beginning: did it arrive, did anyone acknowledge it, does the amount match the delivery, and who is supposed to call when the payment fails to appear? A cannabis company can make a sale and still have an impressive amount of work left to do.

This is an unglamorous place to build a company, which is what makes it interesting. Cannabis has brands, stores, distributors, and software. HQ has made a business out of the gaps between them. Its customers include operators such as Eaze, 710 Labs, Kiva, and Verano. The product is partly time: hours returned to people hired to sell, buy, or make decisions.

The spreadsheet ate the sales call

Consider a reorder. A retailer’s inventory export arrives. Someone has to untangle abbreviated product names, check what is selling, account for goods already shipped, and translate the result into case packs the buyer can actually order. A sales representative can spend the afternoon doing arithmetic before there is anything useful to discuss with a customer.

HQ’s inside-sales service takes on that preparation. It maps the data, calculates proposed quantities, and sends back orders with reasons attached. Crucially, a human mapping layer stays in the process. A calculation can be impeccable and still replenish the wrong product if two systems disagree about its name.

The company reports that Punch’s average Premier Group order per round went from $91,000 to $158,702 with HQ, approximately 73% higher. That is a specific customer example, not a promise for the next brand. The interesting mechanism is attention: accounts receive a considered order rather than whatever a busy rep has time to assemble.

The founder’s problem was delegation

David Peck founded HeadQuarters in 2017. The company’s origin account on Alignable places him at High Times before HQ, seeing a need for affordable administrative support. In a 2025 interview, he described cannabis CEOs trying to grow without the people or systems needed to delegate operational work.

His answer became an execution business. General staffing supplies a person; accounting software supplies a tool. HQ sells responsibility for a recurring workflow. Its cannabis specialization matters because the same awkward details recur across clients. Familiarity with product catalogs, distribution platforms, and payment reconciliation becomes reusable knowledge.

Cash needs a follow-up habit

Accounts receivable makes the distinction especially clear. HQ’s process begins on delivery day, checks invoice receipt within 72 hours, follows a collection cadence, and escalates older balances. Its team handles discrepancies and records promises to pay. Commercial decisions, including whether another order ships, remain with the client.

In its MFNY case study, HQ reports an additional $70,000 in weekly collections after a few months. The advertised $3.64 million annual figure is that weekly improvement multiplied by 52. Read it as an annualized rate, rather than a second, separate pot of recovered money.

“This service is worth it just for building out Premier Group orders.”Sam, Punch / quoted by HeadQuarters

There is something worth copying here even without buying the service. Confirm receipt before chasing payment. Record who promised what, and when. Put an owner and a next action beside every open balance. A spreadsheet becomes useful when it tells someone what to do on Tuesday. The first failure in this process can be remarkably small: an invoice nobody confirmed, or a product name nobody reconciled. Those are the kinds of errors a regular operating routine is designed to catch before the balance gets old.

The price of getting it off your desk

HQ generally scopes engagements around a monthly fee. Its finance page publishes $18,500 per month for controllership, covering a controller, bookkeeping, receivables, and payables. Financial planning and analysis is listed separately at $17,000. Its salary-based comparisons are a model of equivalent staffing costs; an operator should compare the scope with its own workload and hiring economics.

Retail-menu management starts at $3,000 monthly for one to three locations, then adds $1,000 per extra location. The work moves product information from METRC manifests into point-of-sale systems and online menus. Physical receiving and warehouse counting sit outside the scope. Purchasing and compliance ownership stay with the operator.

That boundary is practical. A product can be sitting safely in the building while remaining invisible to shoppers online. Cleaning its catalog entry does not require taking over the buyer’s judgment. It requires someone to finish the handoff.

More automation, with someone still accountable

HQ also offers narrower tools. Plug & Play for Nabis provides dashboards and daily reporting around sales, receivables, fees, and expected remittances. CannaStack helps operators compare software. Its free collections AI skill turns QuickBooks aging exports into messages tailored to invoice age, ready for a person to review and send.

The team behind the services is international, with operations in Mexico and Serbia alongside its US presence. A published employee story follows Ireni from order entry in 2021 into sales-team leadership in 2024. That is a useful glimpse of the expertise being built: people learning how the neighboring departments affect their own work.

The client still has homework

Marketing makes the limits explicit. HQ lists email and Meta management at $4,000 monthly each, with ad spend separate. Clients need fresh photos and video, purchase data connected to analytics, and months for testing. An operator unable to supply those inputs cannot reasonably budget on the published customer outcomes.

The broader point is equally ordinary. Outsourcing needs access, clear approvals, and usable inputs. HQ can work through the administrative backlog; the operator still has to decide what deserves approval. Before adding another tool or another hire, count the unfinished handoffs. That is where this company asks you to look.