About EMS

The gold standard, built by people who ran the spreadsheet.

Excise Management Solutions is the gold standard in excise compliance software — and we got there by doing the unglamorous work first. Canadian excise warehousing is too important and too regulated to run on Excel, email threads and a wall of binders. We built EMS for the operators who live this every day, and refined it into the system the rest of the industry now benchmarks against.

Our story

Why we started.

Our founding team spent years working inside Canadian excise distribution — vape and e-liquid warehousing, federal and provincial stamping, multi-consignee 3PL operations across the GTA. We watched compliant operators lose hours every week to the same problems: stamp inventory tracked in three different spreadsheets, receivers and stampers Slacking each other to reconcile counts, customer service teams retyping the same shipment status into a fifth email thread before noon.

The off-the-shelf WMS products we evaluated didn't know what an excise stamp was. The compliance tools didn't understand a skid. So in 2024 we sat down with three operators across Ontario and Quebec, mapped the actual workflow — receiving → stamping → dispatch → CRA filing — and started building EMS around it. Every feature in the product traces back to a real moment of friction one of our early users named.

Today EMS is in production with a growing roster of distributors and self-importers, and we're shipping new modules monthly. The gold-standard claim is one we work to keep earning every release: comprehensive coverage of the regulatory surface, every action audit-logged, every report dated and signed. The result is excise compliance that finally feels routine.

What we believe

Five things we won't compromise on.

Audit trail by default

Every mutation in EMS is logged with user, timestamp and context. Compliance isn't a feature — it's the substrate.

Operators, not buyers

We design for the receiver scanning a box at 7 a.m., not the executive demoing in a conference room. Both should benefit, but the operator decides.

One source of truth

Spreadsheets diverge. Memories diverge. The system can't. Every screen reads the same canonical state, every time.

Boring is a feature

Software that handles excise compliance shouldn't be flashy. It should be predictable, fast, and obvious.

Customer data is sacred

We host in Canada, encrypt everything, and never sell or repurpose your data. Multi-tenant isolation is enforced at the data layer, not as a UI nicety.

Honest pricing, plain English

Tiered subscriptions, no hidden charges, no retroactive overage bills. If our pricing surprises you, we did something wrong.

The team

Small, opinionated, accountable.

EMS is a Canadian-built, Canadian-hosted platform supported by a small team. We work directly with our customers — there's no support tier between you and the people who write the code. When you email admin@excisems.com, you're talking to someone who can fix it.

  • Engineering & product — built around the warehouse pipeline, with deep customer interview cadence.
  • Compliance advisory — independent counsel who reviews every regulatory update and shapes the reporting modules.
  • Customer success — onboards new customers, runs quarterly compliance reviews on Plus / Pro, captures feature feedback for the roadmap.
See open roles

Our commitments

Things we'll always do, in writing.

Canadian-hosted dataAll customer data resides in AWS Canada (Central) — Montréal.
Same-week supportCustomer reports receive a real human reply within the same business week. Plus / Pro tiers carry response SLAs.
No surprise pricingVolume overages prompt a conversation, never a retroactive invoice.
Public release notesEvery shipped change is documented at release-notes.

Want to see how we built it?

Book a demo and we'll walk through your real workflow with the people who shipped the code.

Book a demo Join us