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Keeping Lightspeed Retail POS (R-Series) secure

You've worked hard to get your business online, and we want to help you protect it. Keep your shop secure by:

  • reviewing reports of system activity
  • assigning employee permissions
  • using PINs for added security

Reviewing reports of system activity

Lightspeed Retail reports let you see what's going on in your store: when sales were made and who made them, discounts given, payments and voids. We recommend these reports to keep you informed about sales activity. To learn how to generate reports, refer to Generating reports.

Sales and Payment Balance: Check what's in the system against the payment received and what's showing in your tills and bank deposits.

Line Employee: Under Grouped Sales Total, the Line Employee report shows the total sales, discounts, and cost by employee. The areas where an employee could cheat the system is by not making sales, by making sales with discounts, or adjusting the price of an item.

For example, if you know that John worked today, and you see in this report that he gave $200 in discounts and other employees gave $50, John is offering far more in discounts than other employees. The cost of the items remains the same, but if John is manually marking down items in the register in the cost/profit/margin columns of the report you'll see that John has a much slimmer margin. You can click the eye icon to display a line report for John and spot the $100 item that John sold for $30.

Voids: shows voided transactions, and the who, when, where and why the item was voided.

Assigning employee permissions

Although reports can show you what's already happened in your store, use employee permissions (roles) to be proactive and control who gets to do what.

For example, you can give the Associate role only the permission to do basic sales, and create a custom Senior Associate role for your most trusted salesperson, and give them the ability to log in externally, open and close registers, give refunds, change prices, and do other tasks that you want to assign to only a highly trusted employee.

To learn how to setup employee roles, refer to Configuring employee roles.

Permission Details
External Login Assign this only to users you trust as this lets an employee log into Lightspeed Retail from any device connected to the internet.
Register Enable only this, and not the other register permissions, if you want the employee to be able to process only a simple sale. This means that an employee can't do refunds, discounts, or manually open and close the register, or manually add to or pay out from the cash drawer.
Inventory Without inventory permission, employees can still look up items and see their price and stock, but they can't adjust the price, or do purchase orders, or adjust the quantity in any way. This is suitable for associates who need to process sales but nothing else, as they can still check if something is in stock.
Service You can enable only Service for service counter personnel in a bike shop, for example, who just need to have access to work orders.
Reports You can enable only Reports for an accountant, for example, who just needs the ability to run reports.

Using PINs for added security

Know who is making each transaction by requiring employees to enter their PIN for each sale. Employees must enter their PIN to start a sale on the register.

Track your work orders by requiring employees to enter their PIN before each work order. For example, if you have a service counter, and multiple people using Lightspeed Retail to create new work orders, add labor costs and other adjustments, each change is tracked. If someone is quoted a work order of $100 for bike repairs, but when the order is complete the charge is $125 because the brakes needed to be re-aligned, you and the customer can know who added that labor charge.

To keep your account safe you can configure Lightspeed Retail to automatically log out or require a PIN after a period of inactivity.

For additional security, use computer anti-virus software to stop malicious software designed to capture your log in information or otherwise compromise your system.

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