Start on day fifty-six. That is the day a New Jersey cannabis invoice typically gets paid, according to Cannabiz Credit Association figures reported by Heady NJ on October 9.
The product left the grower's building on day one.
So for eight weeks, somebody else's cash sat on your shelf and went through your register. That is not a sale with slow paperwork. New Jersey cannabis receivables are loans, made by companies not in the lending business, on terms nobody wrote down. The same reporting put 38.4 percent of what the state's suppliers are owed more than ninety-one days past due.
Here is one invoice, read backwards from the day the money moves. Every marker is a day, and every day belonged to somebody.
Day 56. The money moves.
Josh Krane, who runs Grown Rogue's New Jersey operations, told Heady NJ his company carries roughly a month of sales in receivables, and that some larger companies owe it millions. He did not name them. He did say this: "It's my cash they're making their profit with." And this: "We're not your bank."
He is right on the accounting. A cultivator shipping on terms bought your inventory for you, carried it through grow, cure, testing and transport, and charged nothing to hold it. Krane says his company applies late fees and then waives them to get paid, which tells you what a late fee is worth here.
How much of last month's product did you sell before you had paid for any of it?
Day 30. The invoice comes due, in two other states.
New York put the deadline in its rulebook. Under 9 NYCRR 124.2, a retailer buying on credit pays in full within thirty days of receiving the product. An unpaid supplier notifies the retailer in writing and reports the default to the Office of Cannabis Management, which gives distributors an updated cash-on-delivery list every Wednesday. While a retailer sits on that list no supplier may sell to it on credit, and under 124.2(k) the Cannabis Control Board may suspend, cancel or revoke the license. The guidance is dated January 1, 2026.
California went further. AB 766 requires a licensee buying at least $5,000 from another licensee to pay within fifteen days of the invoice's final due date, which itself cannot sit more than thirty days past the sale. A licensee with an unpaid invoice cannot buy anything else on credit until it clears.
New Jersey has no version of either. Todd Johnson, president of the New Jersey Cannabis Trade Association, told Heady NJ the problem is significant and floated a list of the worst payers. Nobody asks for a list that exists.
Which state's rules would your own aging report survive?
- Dating instead of discount. Net 45 at full cost is usually worth more to a store than five percent off at net 14. Ask for the calendar, not the invoice total.
- Split delivery on one invoice. Half the order now, half in three weeks, dated off the second drop. The shelf fills twice and the clock starts once.
- A posted early-pay discount. Two percent to pay by day ten, printed on the invoice. It turns an argument into a price.
- A small opening line you can grow. Two on-time payments, then more. A limit you keep beats a limit you lose.
- Freight, samples and display costs on their side. These move far more easily than unit price, and they come off your operating line rather than your margin.
Day 14. Half the order is already sold.
Headset put dispensary retail gross margin at 42.7 percent in 2025. At that margin, $250,000 of monthly sales means buying about $143,000 of product at wholesale. Net 30 puts that $143,000 of somebody else's working capital inside your business at all times. Stretch to the market's actual 55.6 days and it is closer to $265,000.
That float is the cheapest money in New Jersey cannabis, which is why it gets abused and why the people extending it now keep lists of their own. It is also why slow stock costs more than it looks: you are aging product you have not paid for, on a clock somebody else is watching. I ran that arithmetic in the post on inventory aging and will not repeat it.
How many days of product do you turn before the invoice behind it comes due?
Day 1. The manifest.
New Jersey's seed-to-sale record follows the plant. The transfer is documented down to the gram, the vehicle and the arrival time, and the state can reconstruct it years later.
Nothing in that record says whether the invoice was ever paid. The product is tracked; the money is not. At the $2,000 to $2,598 a pound New Jersey wholesale flower fetched in the spring of 2026 - worth re-checking before you rely on it - one routine delivery is a six-figure unsecured exposure the state files as a movement of grams.
If a supplier stopped shipping to you tomorrow, how long would your menu hold?
Day zero. The conversation nobody wrote down.
All fifty-six days were decided here, usually on a phone call. No credit application. No financial statements. No personal guarantee. No security interest filed. Two licensed businesses agreed to a number, and one of them shipped.
Krane says Grown Rogue now refuses to sell to thirty or forty New Jersey stores. That is the market building its own enforcement because the state built none, and it is slow, private and unappealable. Whether to file a UCC-1, whether your late fee is enforceable, whether to ask an owner to stand behind the account personally - each is a question for your cannabis attorney, and the answer turns on what your paperwork already says.
Could either side of your largest open invoice produce the document that set its terms?
What New Jersey cannabis receivables do to your price.
Two aging reports go into a diligence file in week one, read in opposite directions. A cultivator's receivables ledger gets tested for collectability, concentration and the names that never pay. A retailer's payables ledger gets tested for stretch, and payables stretched past terms are treated as borrowed money, because that is what they are.
Both land on the same line of a purchase agreement. Working capital is pegged at a target, and anything owed above that target comes off your proceeds at closing rather than being forgiven at it, the mechanic I walked through in the piece on purchase price adjustments. A second cost appears on no schedule: a buyer who calls four growers and learns two will not ship to your store has just repriced your supply chain. It is also why, among the businesses we represent, the clean ones get looked at first.
Fifty-six days is not a payment term. It is a habit that two parties fell into and neither one priced. The grower financed it without interest and the store spent the float without noticing, and in New Jersey nothing in the rulebook interrupts either of them.
Both sides get a bill eventually. The grower's arrives as a receivable a buyer discounts. The store's arrives as a working capital adjustment on the closing statement. If you are on either end of an open invoice this morning, the cheapest hour you will spend this quarter is the one where you find out what you actually agreed to, and write it down.