How to Automate Lightspeed

Lightspeed holds the stock file every store sells from

Lightspeed Retail is the point of sale and inventory system behind a great many specialist shops: bike stores, apparel boutiques, pet shops, jewellers, garden centres, liquor stores, toy shops. Most of them have either a second address, or a shop and a website, or both.

That is the thing that shapes the software. The moment there are two locations, stock stops being something you can check by looking at the shelf. The questions become whether the size a customer wants is in the other store, whether the reorder already went in, and whether the line selling out here is sitting dead across town.

So the stock file becomes the version of the business everybody works from. Floor staff check it mid-sale with a customer waiting. The buyer plans the season out of it. The website sells from it. The owner reads margin out of it on a Sunday. When it is wrong, every one of those is wrong too.

Buying is a week spent on other people's websites

Retail buying sounds like judgement and is mostly admin.

Every brand a shop stocks has its own dealer portal with its own login. That is where an order placed six weeks ago either has a date against it or does not. It is where the invoice sits as a PDF, waiting to be downloaded before the bookkeeper asks a second time. It is where a line got discontinued, the wholesale price moved, or the new season dropped and the good sizes went in a day.

So the buyer's week fills with the same round: eleven logins, a spreadsheet noting which orders are late, an email to a rep who replies on Thursday, and a look at what the same product is listed at on the marketplaces before this week's price changes go in.

None of that is buying. All of it has to happen before buying can.

Lightspeed

A date on every open order The promised delivery date for each outstanding purchase order, read off the supplier's own portal instead of chased by email on a Thursday.

Invoices off the portals Supplier invoices collected from each account login as they appear and matched to the order and the store they belong to.

Shelf prices kept honest What the brand charges you this week against what the same item is listed at where your customers are also looking.

Reorder points only fire on the stock Lightspeed can see

Lightspeed does a great deal of this already, and it is worth running fully before paying for anything else.

Purchase orders can be raised in a few clicks straight from the POS, for one store or several. Reorder points trigger low-stock alerts before a line runs out. Stock transfers move product between locations and keep both counts straight. Lightspeed Scanner turns a phone into a counting and order-fulfilment tool on the shop floor. NuORDER puts a wholesale catalogue inside the POS, so for the brands that sell on it you can browse, order and pull product data down without a second system. Insights reports sales and stock across every location, Advanced Marketing works the customer list, and there is an open API and a workflows layer for teams who have a developer to point at them.

The pattern is that all of it operates on what is already inside Lightspeed, or on a partner Lightspeed has already connected.

Your suppliers are mostly not those partners. The small brand, the local distributor, the importer running a portal built in 2011: each has a login, a screen with your answer on it, and no way at all to send that answer anywhere.

Every open order can have a date against it

You get the dates and the invoices without anybody spending the morning in the portals.

Each outstanding purchase order gets a real delivery date next to it, read off the supplier's own screen, with anything that slipped pushed to the top and anything cancelled flagged before a customer gets promised it again. Supplier invoices come off each portal as they appear and are matched to the order and the store they belong to, so nobody is downloading PDFs on the last day of the month.

Prices get watched in both directions: what the brand is charging you this week, and what the same item is listed at where your customers are also looking, so a shelf price that has drifted out of line is something you know rather than something you find out.

Slow movers in one store and empty pegs in another become a transfer list rather than a markdown in March. Online orders that shipped get checked with the carrier, so the customer emailing about a parcel has an answer waiting.

Keep the deciding. A list of dates, invoices and differences can be assembled overnight without anybody watching. Committing an order and apologising to a customer are still decisions a person makes.

The portal round can happen before the shop opens

Eleven logins and the same three fields on each one: that round does not go away. Who does it, and at what hour, is the part that can change. Right now it is your buyer's morning.

WebRun is an agent that works a real Chrome browser, signed in as you. It opens each dealer portal, finds the orders that are yours, reads the dates and pulls the invoices, and puts all of it beside the purchase order sitting in Lightspeed.

It runs on your schedule inside your own private environment, and you can watch a run and stop it mid-way. Anything that commits money or messages a customer is prepared and waits for you.

Each of the workflows below is already built, and names the portals it opens before you turn it on.