Reporting in Retail POS gives you access to real-time data and reports on your business for all outlets across web, iOS, and Android. Retail POS offers two types of reporting—basic reporting and advanced reporting. Which type you have is based on your Retail POS plan.
With basic reporting, you have everything you need to understand how your business is performing across all your outlets.
With advanced reporting, however, you have a more complete and detailed view of your business. The different metrics available on advanced reports empower you to draw insights and make more informed decisions about revenue, profitability, and inventory performance.
Advanced reporting also gathers insights on your product and selling strategy. These insights, in turn, help you increase sales, improve staff performance, and make more informed purchasing decisions.
You can learn more about your plan availability, the difference between basic reporting versus advanced reporting, and what's included in basic reporting and advanced reporting in the sections below.
Plan availability
Whether you have basic or advanced reporting depends on your plan and add-on features. To see what plan you’re on, go to Setup > Billing. Retail POS will display your plan in the following message: You’re currently on the X plan.
For more information on plans and pricing, please see our pricing page.
Basic reporting vs. advanced reporting
Below are the key reports available for basic reporting and the additional reports available with advanced reporting. You can learn more about each individual report in the basic reporting and advanced reporting sections below.
Basic reporting
- Home dashboard
- Sales reports:
- Sales history
- Sales summary
- Customer groups
- Promotions
- Sales channels
- Report measures:
- Sales count
- Revenue
- Revenue (including tax)
- Gross profit
- Margin (%)
- Discounted
- Discounted (%)
- Tax
- Payments reports
- Lightspeed Payments reports
- Register closures
- Gift card report
- Store credit report
- Tax rate report
Advanced reporting
All basic reporting reports plus:
- Customizable home dashboard
- Retail dashboard
- Additional sales reports:
- Products
- SKU name
- Users
- Customers
- Brand
- Supplier
- Product category
- Tag
- Variant attribute
- Register
- Outlet
- Additional report measures:
- COGS
- Return count
- Return (%)
- Customer count
- Sales with customer (%)
- Items sold
- Average items per sale
- Average sale value
- Average sale value (including tax)
- First sale date
- Last sale date
- Ability to compare periods (date or period)
- Inventory reports:
- Summary
- Replenishment
- Performance
- Dusty inventory
- Sell through
- Recently out of stock
- Inventory types reports
Basic reporting
- Available on all plans
Here's what's included with basic reporting.
Home dashboard
From the home dashboard, you can see your business performance at a glance. All managers and admin users can see this dashboard. This gives them instant access to your most important sales metrics for your day, week, or month. These sales metrics include:
- Sale values (with comparison to the previous period)
- Average sale value (with comparison to the previous period)
- Average items per sale (with comparison to the previous period)
- Gross profit
- Revenue
Sales reports
Sales reports provide you with a simple summary of your sales over a specified date range. This allows you to easily see your best-performing promotions, customer types, and sales channels.
These sales reports include:
- Sales history
- Sales summary
- Customer groups
- Promotion (not available on Lite plan)
- Sales channel (not available on Lite plan)
With basic reporting, you can also see the following measures (not available on Lite plan):
- Sales count
- Revenue
- Revenue (including tax)
- Gross profit
- Margin (%)
- Discounted
- Discounted (%)
- Tax
This allows you to monitor discounts and margins, track profit and revenue, and easily record tax costs.
Payments reports
Payments reports allow you to see and export a breakdown of all payment types over a selected period. With basic reporting, you have access to the payment types report.
Lightspeed Payments
If you have Lightspeed Payments, you have access to the Lightspeed Payments report. It allows you to see payout, fees, and transaction amounts for accurate reconciliations.
Register closures
With the register closure report, you can easily check your cash and credit totals across recorded sales. This gives you a snapshot of the day's activity.
Gift cards
The gift card report (not available on Lite plan) helps you keep track of your gift card liability and easily check gift card balances across all locations.
Store credit
Use the store credit report to track any store credit issued and check a customer's store credit balance across all locations.
Tax rate
With the tax rate report, you can easily track all tax types across all locations to easily handle monthly, quarterly, or end-of-financial-year reviews.
Advanced reporting
- Available on Pro, Advanced, Enterprise
- Available on Core, Plus
Advanced reporting includes all the reports in basic reporting plus the reports and options listed below.
Home dashboard
Advanced reporting includes options for you to customize your home dashboard. You can add additional metrics, such as average sale value, discounts or top products sold under Things to know. This allows your store managers to quickly see the most important metrics throughout the day and make smarter decisions on the shop floor.
Retail dashboard
The retail dashboard allows managers and admin users to easily see key performance metrics for your business across all or selected outlets. This dashboard also lets you easily see trends across days, weeks, or months so you can make more informed decisions about your business.
Sales Reports
With advanced reporting, you have access to more sales reports, and you can add a comparison period to them.
The sales summary allows you to track sales progress, forecast for future periods, and make promotional decisions based on real data.
The metrics included in the sales summary are:
- Products (available on Lite plan)
- SKU name (available on Lite plan)
- Users (available on Lite plan)
- Customers (available on Lite plan)
- Brand
- Supplier
- Product category
- Tag
- Variant attribute: size
- Register
- Outlet
Within the reports, you can also see additional measures:
- COGS
- Return count (available on Lite plan)
- Return (%)
- Customer count (available on Lite plan)
- Sales with customer (%)
- Items sold
- Average items per sale
- Average. sale value
- Average. sale value (including tax)
- First sale date
- Last sale date
- Compare periods (same date and period)
These additional measures help you understand trends, monitor employee discounting and customer input, and set clearer store targets for your teams.
The individual performance report enables you to effectively measure and enhance your sales staff's performance by giving you a detailed view of various performance metrics for each staff member.
The sales by hour of day report helps you identify peak transaction periods and optimize your staffing needs.
Individual performance and sales by hour of day reports are not available on the discontinued Pro plan.
Inventory reports
Advanced reporting includes the following inventory reports:
- All inventory report (Available on Lite plan)
- On-hand inventory report (Available on Lite plan)
- Low inventory report
- Inventory summary report
- Inventory replenishment report
- Inventory performance report
- Inventory sell through report
- Inventory recently out of stock report
- Dusty inventory report
The inventory summary report allows retailers to see your entire inventory or just products with on-hand or low inventory. You can also see brands, SKUs, outlets, suppliers, and product categories. This allows you to easily compare your inventory to a previous season or promotional period or simply understand your inventory position at any time.
The inventory replenishment report summarizes closing inventory, items sold, and days covered. It also allows you to add reorder points, reorder amounts, and other metrics to help you to stay on top of what you need to order and when. This helps you make sure you never run out of your bestsellers, estimate a cost for your purchase orders, and better understand customer demand for products.
The inventory performance report allows you to compare products, product categories, brands, suppliers, and SKUs. This helps inform your purchasing strategy by understanding what's selling well and what's not moving.
The inventory sell through report shows you at a glance how much of your inventory you are selling during a specified date range. This report can show you your best performing products, categories, brands, or even suppliers to help you make informed decisions about your inventory control.
The dusty inventory report shows you what products in your inventory are not selling quickly and might need to be remerchandized, put on clearance, or discontinued. You can view this information formatted by location so you can see which of your locations the products might sell better. You can then move dusty stock to other locations where sales are more likely.
The recently out of stock inventory report shows products with zero or negative inventory alongside sales and revenue data. You can view which out of stock items you should prioritize reordering based on high revenue or high sales figures. This report is displayed by outlet to show exactly where stock is needed.
The inventory sell through, dusty inventory, and recently out of stock reports are not available on the discontinued Pro plan.
Payments reports
With advanced reporting, you can also compare payment types across periods in the payments report.
Saving reports
Sales, inventory, payments, and tax reports can be customized to suit your workflows and saved for use in the future. For more information on saving custom reports, refer to Saving customized reports.
Scheduling reports
You can schedule reports to be automatically emailed to stakeholders on a daily, weekly, or monthly basis. For more information on scheduling reports, refer to Scheduling reports.
Demand forecasting with the Insights module
- Available on Standard and Lean with the Advanced Reporting and Insights add-ons
- Available on Advanced and Enterprise with the Insights add-on
- Available on Plus
The Insights module includes specialized inventory report features to save you time and improve your ordering accuracy.
The use of this forecasting tool is at the user’s own risk. Lightspeed cannot guarantee the accuracy and reliability of the forecasts generated. Actual results may differ. The tool is provided for informational purposes only and should not be considered as financial, investment, or legal advice. Users are encouraged to exercise caution before making business decisions based on the tool’s output.
Out of stock measures
The out of stock measures Missed items sold and Estimated items sold measures added to the inventory replenishment report. These measures show how many potential units could have been sold if the item had not gone out of stock.
Demand forecasting measures
Demand forecasting measures added to the Replenishment report can help reduce the number of out of stock days and ensure you have the right amount of stock for busy periods. The Forecasted demand and Suggested reorder quantity columns can help you plan your ordering for items you sell consistently throughout the year.
Creating purchase orders with demand forecasting
Use demand forecasting to quickly determine how much stock you need to order and create purchase orders directly from the inventory reports page. When used in combination with out of stock and forecasting demand measures, this feature enables you to streamline your inventory management by suggesting quantities to order based on forecasted demand. Although you can only create a purchase order for one supplier at a time, these reports can be saved for easier future use.