A sale is the last event Metrc ever records for a package. Everything before it, planting, harvest, packaging, every transfer, exists to get a product to this exact point: into a customer's hands, logged, and closed out. Retailers are the only license type that records sales, and the reporting rules around it are stricter than most of the rest of Metrc.
Two Ways In, One Deadline
Sales get entered manually, one receipt at a time, or through data import, either a CSV upload or an API connection from a point-of-sale vendor that's completed Metrc's certification process. Whichever method you use, every sale has to be entered into Metrc within 24 hours of the transaction. That's not a target, it's the compliance window.
On top of daily sales entry, physical inventory has to be reconciled against what Metrc shows at least once every 30 days. Sales reporting keeps the record current day to day; reconciliation is the check that catches drift before it becomes a real discrepancy.
What a Manual Sale Actually Needs
Six pieces of information, every time: the date and time of the sale, the type of customer, the Metrc package ID involved, the quantity sold from that package, the unit of measure, and the total dollar amount sold before tax and after any discount.
Customer type is one of three options: Consumer for adult-use, Patient, or Caregiver. California doesn't require you to actually track a specific patient or caregiver ID number, those fields are available but optional. What California does require is that any donation to a medicinal patient or their caregiver be recorded with the Customer Type set correctly, and the Total Price entered as exactly $0.00. A donation logged with any other customer type, or with a nonzero price, isn't recording what actually happened.
Package lookup doesn't require the full tag number. Typing the last three digits and searching narrows it down fast, since Metrc's magnifying glass search runs against whatever fragment you provide.
Entering a Sale, Start to Finish
Pick the sale date and time
Select the customer type
Consumer, Patient, or Caregiver.
Pull in the package
By its last few digits or a full lookup.
Enter quantity and unit of measure
Enter the total price
Add another package line if needed
More than one package can be part of the same sale.
Save the receipt
Add multiple receipts on the same page to record several sales in a single batch instead of one at a time.
Receipts Can Be Fixed, but Only While They're Active
A sales receipt stays editable, date, time, customer type, quantity, price, package details, until it's marked Finalized. Finalizing a receipt moves it to the Inactive tab and locks it, which speeds up lookups on high-volume days but also means you've decided that entry is done. If something needs correcting after finalizing, Unfinalize brings it back to Active and reopens it for editing. Void removes a receipt outright rather than correcting it.
One thing not to reach for: package adjustments. If a sale was recorded wrong, fix the sales receipt directly. Adjustments exist for correcting package weight and quantity discrepancies elsewhere in the chain, not for fixing what happened at the register.