Lightspeed Analytics Core acquires all its sales and inventory data from Lightspeed Retail, however many of the reports in Analytics illustrate action points and trends in a different way than the built-in Retail reports. When attempting to balance reports in Analytics and in Retail, it's important to make sure the reports are actually equivalent.
Up-to-date data
Lightspeed Retail is a live service, so the information you're seeing is always up-to-date. Analytics, however, only synchronizes with Retail every two hours. This means the data you see in Analytics for today's date will not include up to two hours' worth of information.
That's important to keep in mind when specifying a date range for a report, but it's also important to note that Retail's end date is inclusive while Analytics's end date is exclusive. If you want to run a report for the entire month of January, you would specify the date range of Jan. 1 to Jan. 31 in Retail, and Jan. 1 to Feb. 1 in Analytics.
What the report means
When comparing reports between Retail and Analytics, it's important to understand what each report is doing with the data, and which data is included and which is not.
Sales reports
The terminology used in Retail and Analytics does not always mean the same thing, and there isn't always a one-to-one correspondence between metrics.
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While these terms differ between platforms, Costs, Profit, and Margins are the same.
Inventory reports
One of the more popular reports in Analytics is the Dusty Inventory report, which will help you identify the items in your inventory that have not sold recently (see Configuring Lightspeed Analytics to see how to define what counts as recently sold). If your Retail account has multiple shops, however, the Dusty Inventory report will not limit itself to your current shop; it will show you items that have not sold recently at any shop.
If you'd like to isolate dusty items from a particular shop, you can add the Store dimension to the report to see at which location items have not been selling. You can then also filter the report by store location to see the results for that shop alone.
It is also worth noting that inventory reports do not report on the sale quantity of non-inventory items. This is important to remember if you are comparing an inventory valuation report with sales included in it with a sales report from Retail.
Through the Configuration section of Analytics, it is possible to hide select top-level categories from inventory reports. It's important to be aware of which categories are hidden when comparing reports.
Not all reports are designed to balance with other reports
If two reports were meant to show the same information the same way, they would be redundant. If you are comparing reports and find that they do not balance with one another, consider whether or not this is expected given the differences in terminology and what the included data means. If you want to see matching numbers in Analytics and Retail for peace of mind, it is possible to add Calculations to an Analytics report to create metrics that will align with the reports in Retail.
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