You can create discounts that you can apply to sales and customers. A discount in Lightspeed Retail can have either a fixed dollar amount or be a percentage discount.

You can apply fixed discounts to individual items, but not to an entire sale. You can apply percentage discounts to line items, sales and customers.

Creating discounts

To apply discounts to a sale, you first need to create them ahead of time under Settings > Discounts.

You can create two types of discounts: fixed (e.g. $10.00 off) and percentage (e.g. 10% off). Both can be applied to individual sale items. However, only percentage discounts can be applied to entire sales.

1. From the main menu, click Settings > Discounts > + New Discount.
2. From Type, select either Fixed or Percent.

   Fixed dollar discounts can only be applied to individual items and not to an entire sale.

3. Click Save Changes to display the settings for the type of discount you're creating.
4. Enter a discount name.
5. Enter discount amount in percent % off (e.g. 20% off) or $ amount off (e.g. 20% off
6. (Optional) Select Require Customer. This is helpful if you need to track which customers are given discounts in your reporting.
7. Click Save.

You can create a percentage discount to cover a customer's sales tax using the equation: r/(1 + r) = x where r is your sales tax rate and x is the discount percentage that is required to make the sale tax-free for your customer. For example, a sale taxed at 8% is inputted as 0.08/(1 + 0.08) = x and the discount percentage (x) is 0.074 or 7.4%.