Lightspeed Analytics Core acquires all its sales and inventory data from Retail POS, however many of the reports in Analytics illustrate action points and trends in a different way than built-in Retail POS reports. When attempting to balance reports in Analytics and in Retail POS, it's important to make sure the reports match.
Understanding Lightspeed Analytics Core and Retail POS
Retail POS is a live service, so the information you're seeing is always up-to-date. Analytics synchronizes with Retail POS 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. It's important to account for this when specifying a date range for a report.
Also, in Retail POS the 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 Jan. 1 to Jan. 31 in Retail POS and Jan. 1 to Feb. 1 in Analytics.
Comparing reports
When comparing reports between Retail POS and Analytics, it's important to understand what each report is doing with the data, and what data is or is not included.
Sales reports
The terminology used in Retail POS and Analytics may differ:
Retail POS
- Subtotal: sales total before Discounts are removed and before Taxes have been added
- Discounts: dollar amount to be deducted
- Total: sales total after discounts have been removed and after taxes have been added
- QOH: quantity on hand remaining in your inventory
Analytics
- Total: sales total after Discounts are removed but before Taxes are added
- QOH: quantity on hand remaining in your inventory for items that have had sales (items in a category that have not sold in the specified date range are not included)
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 you have multiple locations, the Dusty Inventory report will show you items that have not sold recently at any location.
If you'd like to isolate dusty items from a particular location, you can add the Store dimension to the report to see where items have not been selling. You can then also filter the report by store location to see the results for that shop alone.
Inventory reports don't 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 POS.
In the Configuration section of Analytics you can hide select top-level categories from inventory reports. Keep in mind which categories are hidden when comparing reports.
Reporting differences
If you are comparing reports and find the data doesn't match, 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 POS, you can add Calculations to an Analytics report to create metrics that will align with the reports in Retail POS.