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Sales, forecasting, and reports

Now that you have information freely flowing from Lightspeed Retail to Lightspeed Accounting to your accounting software, Lightspeed Accounting will track all of the information that passes through it. While you are likely going to do most of your reporting in Lightspeed Retail or in your accounting software, Lightspeed Accounting does offer a few reports and some helpful forecasting features as well.

Sales

The sales page will give you an at-a-glance overview of your performance. Here you can see a direct comparison between the sales made this year and the sales made this time last year. You can also compare these figures to any goals you've set for the current year.

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The Sales by Week bar graph on this page will show Sales, Comp Sales, and Goals:

  • Sales: Your sales totals by week.
  • Comp Sales: Your sales totals for the same week last year.
  • Goals: Target sales totals by week according to your forecasting.

Any of these metrics can be removed from the graph by clicking its name at the top of the graph.

The entire page can be filtered by date and by store location. If the filter is set to All Stores, you'll also see a table comparing the performance of each store.

Forecasting

The Goals displayed on the Sales page are calculated in the Forecasting section.

Forecasting.png

In this section, you can set a desired target Increase % for this year's sales as compared to last year's sales. When you click Recalculate, Lightspeed Accounting will automatically populate the calendar with calculated daily sales goals that, if reached, will achieve your desired target Increase %. Daily sales goals are based on which days are traditionally more active days for the retail world (e.g. your sales goals for a Saturday will be higher than for a Monday).

Reports

The reports available to you in Lightspeed Accounting are simplistic compared to the reporting you can do in Lightspeed Retail or in your accounting software, but if you ever find that certain information doesn't appear in your accounting software as expected, these reports will help you determine why:

  • Sales Totals

    The Sales Totals report is your go-to report when sales information has not synced to your accounting software. It can be filtered by store location and by date range.

    Screen_Shot_2018-08-23_at_3.50.38_PM.png

    Click Refresh to generate the report. 

    Screen_Shot_2018-08-23_at_5.33.45_PM.png

    The report will generate daily totals. These totals represent your daily syncs from Lightspeed Retail to your accounting software. The Sales column will indicate a status for that sync:

    • POST: The information is ready to sync to your accounting software, but hasn't been synced yet.
    • POSTED: The information has synced to your accounting software.
    • HOLD: Something is preventing this sync from taking place. This is most commonly caused by an incomplete mapping of information.
    • NONE: There was no data to sync on this day.
    • OOB: The sales data for this sync is out of balance and will need to be corrected before it can sync. Lightspeed Support can assist you with this.
    • FAILED: The sync was attempted but did not go through. Lightspeed Support can assist you with this.
    • UPDATE: There is an update to the data for this day that is ready to be synced.
    • UPDATED: The data has been updated since its original sync and has been resynced.

    If you'd like to see more detailed information about the activity on a particular date, you can click on the date itself. You can then view:

    • A Summary of the day's Total RevenueTotal Receipts, and Cash
    • An overview of Product Sales
    • An overview of the payments you've received in the Checks section (all payment types, not only checks)
    • A report on the syncing of the day's information in the Accounting section

    The Accounting section will be the most useful when determining why a sync may not have been completed. Here you can see the status of the sync and a reporting of what information was sent where.

    NOTE: In the case of QuickBooks Desktop, you'll also see confirmation of whether or not the sync has gone through. A status of POSTED with a False value for the sync would indicate that the information is ready to be sent to QuickBooks Desktop, but the Web Connector has not yet been run to retrieve the information.

    Screen_Shot_2018-08-27_at_1.48.50_PM.png

    If you find you are missing a day's sync in your accounting software, you can check this page to see if anything in the Description column is not lined up with a corresponding G/L Account or Item in your accounting software. This would indicate that the Lightspeed Retail item in the Description column has not yet been mapped under Settings > Accounting and it would result in the day's sync being put on HOLD. To correct this issue, simply complete the missing mapping. The status for the day's sync will change from HOLD to POST and the information will go over with the next daily sync.

    Still have questions?

    With that, you should now have all of the information you need to set up your Lightspeed Accounting connections, configure your options and map your accounts, monitor your information, and troubleshoot failed syncs. Now you can sit back and let your bookkeeping populate itself! 

    If you ever find you have more questions, though, we're here to help! Don't hesitate to reach out to our Support Team and they'll answer your questions and help you resolve any issues you've encountered.

  • Product Sales

    The Product Sales report will show you a breakdown of your sales for the day by individual item. It can be filtered by store location and by date range.

    Screen_Shot_2018-08-23_at_3.50.38_PM.png

    Click Refresh to generate the report. 

    Screen_Shot_2018-08-27_at_2.31.48_PM.png

    Note: The SKU column represents an item's Lightspeed Retail System ID and the Department column represents its Lightspeed Retail Category. 

     

    Still have questions?

    With that, you should now have all of the information you need to set up your Lightspeed Accounting connections, configure your options and map your accounts, monitor your information and troubleshoot failed syncs. Now you can sit back and let your bookkeeping populate itself! 

    If you ever find you have more questions, though, we're here to help! Don't hesitate to reach out to our Support Team and they'll answer your questions and help you resolve any issues you've encountered.

  • Purchasing

    The Purchasing report will give you an overview of the purchase orders and vendor returns that are syncing from Lightspeed Retail to your accounting software. It can be filtered by store location and by date range.

    Screen_Shot_2018-08-23_at_3.50.38_PM.png

    Click Refresh to generate the report. 

    Screen_Shot_2018-08-27_at_2.45.34_PM.png

    The Order ID is the Lightspeed Retail purchase order ID and you can see at a glance which vendor that ID is for. Vendor returns will be represented here as orders with a negative total.

    It's important to note that a purchase order will only sync once. When the status of the PO is set to Finished, that will indicate to Lightspeed Accounting that the order is ready to be synced. If the status of the order is then reverted back to a previous state to make changes, then set to Finished again, the order will not resync and the changes will not be made in your accounting software. We recommend keeping your purchase orders in the Check-in state until they are finalized if you can. If you must sync your orders and make adjustments after the fact, remember to make those adjustments manually in both Lightspeed Retail and your accounting software.

    If you'd like to see more detailed information about the activity on a particular date, you can click on the date itself. You can then view:

    • A Summary of the day's Total RevenueTotal Receipts, and Cash
    • An overview of Product Sales
    • An overview of the payments you've received in the Checks section (all payment types, not only checks)
    • A listing of any other Purchasing activity on that date
    • A report on the syncing of the day's information in the Accounting section

    If you find a given order has not synced over to your accounting software yet, it's likely due to a mismatch in the vendor name in Lightspeed compared to the vendor name in your accounting software. You can check this report to see what vendor name Lightspeed Accounting attempted to sync to and double-check that it is an exact match with the vendor name in your accounting software. Resolving these mismatches often requires operations that are available only to Lightspeed Support agents, so please feel free to contact our Support Team if you encounter this issue.

    Still have questions?

    With that, you should now have all of the information you need to set up your Lightspeed Accounting connections, configure your options and map your accounts, monitor your information, and troubleshoot failed syncs. Now you can sit back and let your bookkeeping populate itself! 

    If you ever find you have more questions, though, we're here to help! Don't hesitate to reach out to our Support Team and they'll answer your questions and help you resolve any issues you've encountered.

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