Cannabis wholesale still settles largely in cash, cheques and slipping net terms. Bank-to-bank invoicing settles a specific invoice next day on federally regulated banking rails, with recurring billing for standing orders. The buyer connects a business bank account once and confirms, and the payment is tied to that invoice rather than arriving against an ageing balance.
Nacha President and CEO Jane Larimer, on the 2025 B2B figures: “no business should be sending or receiving checks in 2026.”
The short version
- Wholesale cannabis largely settles in cash, cheques, or wire, on net terms that slip.
- Cash pickups concentrate risk in a vehicle and a person, on a predictable schedule.
- Bank-to-bank invoicing settles B2B payments next day against a specific invoice.
- Recurring billing handles standing orders without re-invoicing each cycle.
The part of the industry nobody built a product for
Payment coverage in cannabis is written almost entirely for the retail counter. Cultivators, processors and distributors are moving far larger amounts per transaction, far less frequently, and are doing it with the least infrastructure in the supply chain.
In practice, a wholesale invoice gets settled one of four ways: a cash pickup, a cheque, a wire if both parties have banking that permits it, or a slow drip of partial payments against an ageing balance. Each has a specific failure mode.
- Cash pickup. Someone drives a route with a bag. The schedule is predictable to anyone paying attention, which is the entire risk.
- Cheques. Slow, and they bounce. Recovering against a bounced cheque from a cannabis licensee is a legal process most operators will not start.
- Wire. Works when both sides have cooperative banking. Expensive per transaction, and the relationship can end without warning.
- Partial payments. Net 30 becomes net 60 becomes a negotiation, and the receivable funds the buyer's operation instead of yours.
Why the card networks were never the answer here
Even setting aside the classification problem, card rails are a poor fit for wholesale. Interchange on a fifty thousand dollar invoice is punitive, ticket sizes far outside the coded category's normal range are exactly what monitoring is built to flag, and card limits do not accommodate B2B amounts.
Wholesale was never going to be solved by a better card program. It needed a bank transfer that could be tied to an invoice.
How bank-to-bank B2B invoicing works
An invoice is issued from the dashboard against a specific buyer, with line items and terms. The buyer receives it and pays by connecting their business bank account once and confirming. Funds settle bank-to-bank on federally regulated banking rails, next day, into your account, tied to that invoice.
- Invoice issued from the dashboard, with line items, amounts and terms.
- Buyer receives it by email or link, no account setup required on their side beyond connecting a bank once.
- Payment confirmed against that specific invoice, in full or against agreed instalments.
- Funds settle next day into your bank account.
- Ledger updated automatically if you use QuickBooks.
For standing orders, recurring billing runs the same invoice on a schedule without re-issuing it each cycle, which removes the administrative friction that causes regular wholesale relationships to drift out of terms.
What changes on the receivables side
Payment becomes a specific event tied to a specific document, rather than a partial amount arriving against an ageing balance. That makes ageing reports mean something and makes credit decisions about a buyer possible.
The cash run stops. That is a safety outcome before it is a financial one, and it also removes the labour of counting, transporting, and depositing large sums, plus the deposit relationship that transporting them requires.
Reconciliation stops being manual matching between a bank statement, a cheque stub and an invoice register, because the settlement record and the invoice are the same object.
Wholesale and retail in one place
Vertically integrated operators usually end up running two disconnected payment setups, one for the store and one for the wholesale book, with a spreadsheet in between. The same platform covers both: in-store QR and delivery pay links on the retail side, invoicing and recurring billing on the wholesale side, settling into the same account with reporting across both.
For operators whose wholesale book is the larger half of the business, that is usually the more consequential half of the demo.