Lightspeed Analytics is a robust reporting system that visualizes key metrics of your store’s performance, helping you make more data-driven decisions and run your business more efficiently. You can leverage built-reports or design your own from scratch (advanced) to gain deeper insights into profitable products, inventory optimization opportunities, and more.

With Analytics reports, you can:

• See what's selling and what isn't
• Identify which stores are performing well or underperforming
• Understand what factors are driving profitability
• Catch inventory issues, like low stock or dusty stock
• Monitor how employees are performing
• Track customers' average lifetime value, repeat purchases, and trends

There are three versions of Lightspeed Analytics, depending on your business needs:

• Lightspeed Analytics: Full suite of reporting features.
• Analytics Core: Essential reporting features.
• Analytics Enterprise: Essential reporting features designed to report on multi-Retail POS accounts.

Comparing Lightspeed Analytics and Analytics Core

Lightspeed Analytics offers the full suite of reporting features, while Analytics Core focuses on the essentials.

Features available in Lightspeed Analytics and Analytics Core

• Dashboard views
• Selected standard sales reports
• Selected standard inventory reports
• Selected standard employee reports
• Filtering

Features available in Lightspeed Analytics only

The following features are not available in Analytics Core.

• Custom reports
• Favorite reports
• Advanced reports drill-down
• Report dictionary
• Goals and Goals vs Actual
• Daily target reports
• Scheduling, sharing, and emailing reports

Comparing Lightspeed Analytics and Analytics Enterprise

Lightspeed Analytics Enterprise offers a reduced collection of Analytics reports designed to report on multiple Retail POS accounts, like:

• Multiple physical locations with different tax implications
• Different owners for different locations
• Franchises (mid-market high Monthly Recurring Revenue (MRR) customers)
• Multi-currency needs

Enterprise account holders, such as corporate HQ franchisors or users that need access to other data, can view data from multiple retail accounts in one single analytics account. You can view sales daily, weekly, or monthly by category across store locations. This can help you determine how well a store is doing, and what kind of customers are served, including services offered.

As an Enterprise customer, can add new users to access Enterprise. Users added to the enterprise receive an onboarding email. If the user has an existing account, it will state that they now have access to Enterprise. If the user does not have access to a basic analytics account, the email will ask them to set up a password and they will only have access to the Enterprise environment.

Features available in Lightspeed Analytics and Analytics Enterprise

• Dimensions
• Measures
• Calculations
• Custom fields
• Visualizations
• Sync time
• Saving custom reports
• Creating custom reports
• Suggesting report ideas
• Creating, deleting, and modifying users
• Downloading reports

Features available in Lightspeed Analytics only

The following features are not available in Analytics Enterprise.

• Dashboards
• Scheduling
• Settings:
  • Subscriptions
  • Configuration
  • Goals
• Data conventions

  Understanding data conventions in Analytics Enterprise

  A key distinction between Analytics and Analytics Enterprise is your stores’ data conventions. This refers to how you assign names and details to your data. This can include naming conventions of products, categorization of products, how your category trees are defined, and whether you are using the same ID fields to hold various codes.

  Product naming

  As an example, say that two of your Retail POS accounts are selling the same small blue baseball cap. If one of your stores lists the item as Baseball Cap - Blue - Small and a second one of your stores lists the item as Baseball Cap - Blu - SM, Analytics will not understand that these should be considered the same product. Analytics can prepare reports that identify variance around products within companies, but the more closely you ensure that all products that are the same have the same descriptions, IDs, etc., the better your data quality.

  Product categories

  As another example, if have the same baseball cap product in two different stores, but in one it is in a category tree of Apparel > Headwear > Baseball Caps, and in your second store, it is in a category tree of Headwear > Caps. When you run Analytics reports by category, or by top-level category, your results will not be optimized.

  You can use Analytics Enterprise to identify instances of items in multiple categories that can then be adjusted in Retail POS so that Analytics can provide you with optimal insight.