Retail tools for Lightspeed

Retail is for stores that run on Lightspeed Retail (R-Series), or on Shopify (see Shopify as your store system). Once Lightspeed is connected, every sale, item and shop comes into TicketStacker on its own, every minute, so your sales reports and the store tools built on them are always current. You never export a spreadsheet again.

Retail is an add-on. When your company has it, the left menu gets a Sales & Inventory section (see Sales & Inventory), with these tools under its items. Company Admins choose who else sees it on Settings → Roles & access, in the chart's Users column (All users, Only users I choose or Hidden). To try it first, an Admin can start a free trial (see Add-on free trials).

Connect Lightspeed

Only company Admins can connect it.

1. Open Sales & Inventory → Setup (the Lightspeed tab if you also have Inventory).
2. Click Connect Lightspeed. Lightspeed asks you to sign in and allow TicketStacker.
3. You land back on Setup with "Lightspeed is connected", and the first sync starts.

TicketStacker keeps the Lightspeed sign-in locked away where no one can read it, not even your Admins. It renews the sign-in by itself. Syncing only reads from Lightspeed; it doesn't change anything there.

The first sync brings in your shops, employees, vendors, brands, categories, the whole item catalog and the last two days of sales. A large catalog can take a few minutes.

Employees (with their work email, phone, role and store, never pay, hours or PINs) are added to People, where Admins merge them with members and invite them.

What stays in step

Every minute, TicketStacker asks Lightspeed for anything new or changed:

• Sales, with every line (item, quantity, price, discounts, tax, cost), payment and customer.
• Items: descriptions, UPCs, System IDs, prices, costs, brand, vendor and category.
• Stock at each shop: on hand, reorder point and reorder level.
• Shops, employees, vendors, brands, categories and payment types, every few hours.

A sale that's still open (on hold, or not paid yet) is updated as soon as it's finished in Lightspeed.

Sync now on Setup runs a sync right away. The Sync history list shows syncs that brought something in, every Sync now and any problems. Quiet minutes aren't listed.

Load your sales history

New sales start coming in when you connect. To bring in older sales too, an Admin picks a date under Load sales from on Setup and clicks Save. They load in the background, newest first, a few thousand a minute, while new sales keep coming in. Years of history can take several hours. Setup shows how far back sales go, and says when history back to your date is loaded.

To go further back later, pick an earlier date and Save again; what's loaded stays. Stop loading history stops loading older sales and keeps what's there.

Sales

Sales & Inventory → Overview opens on today so far: net sales and number of sales by shop, compared with the same weekday last year, plus yesterday and the last 7 days.

Sales shows any date range:

• Net sales, Transactions (with the average sale), Profit with its margin, and Items sold, compared with the same dates a year earlier.
• A breakdown by Day, Month, Shop, Category, Brand, Vendor, Employee or Item, each with sales, returns, net, cost, profit, margin, items and transactions.
• Pick a Shop to see just one store.
• Download CSV for the same view with every row, to use in Excel or Google Sheets.

How the numbers work:

• Only completed sales count, and voided sales don't count at all.
• Amounts are before tax.
• Discounts are already taken off.
• Returns (lines with a negative quantity) are subtracted, so Net sales = sales − returns.
• Cost is Lightspeed's average cost for each item at the time it sold, so profit matches Lightspeed's own reports.

When something goes wrong

If a sync fails, Setup says Needs attention and shows Lightspeed's reason under Last result. Retail also shows the problem at the top of the page. TicketStacker tries again every minute, so a short Lightspeed outage fixes itself. If Lightspeed stops accepting the saved sign-in (someone removed TicketStacker's access in Lightspeed, for example), an Admin clicks Disconnect and then Connect Lightspeed again.

Lightspeed limits how fast any app can ask it for data. TicketStacker slows down as it gets close to the limit, so it never gets in the way of your registers.

Disconnect

An Admin clicks Disconnect on Setup and confirms with Yes, disconnect. TicketStacker forgets the Lightspeed sign-in and stops syncing. The sales and items already copied stay.