Major Pain Points for LightSpeed Retail POS

We recently deployed LightSpeed Retail POS in our brick-and-mortar store.  We have about 1500 different items, and sell many things in bulk.  This post lists some of the major issues we are running into with LightSpeed Retail POS (currently version 3.8.1.0).

Update: We are currently experiencing data corruption with Lighspeed POS.  Updates posted here.  

 No Fractional Cents for Product Costs

When you enter the cost of an item, you are not allowed to enter a cost with fractional cents.  For example, for a bulk foods section, assume you buy your Wheat Flour in 50 pound bags with a supplier cost of 41.92 per bag.  You should enter a product called "Wheat Flour Bulk per lb" with a supplier cost of 1.19275.  When you order from your supplier, you order qty 50 for each bag, and the PO cost would be correct.

In LightSpeed, however, you are not allowed to enter more than two decimal places of cost.  You are forced to enter a supplier cost of 1.19.  This means your POs are all wrong.  You may think about using build/break apart as a workaround, and creating an additional item called "50 lb bag, wheat flour", but this is a horrible solution for many reasons.  (Staff has to exit point of sale, do break aparts, receiving is complicated, searches are complicated, inventory is screwed up, errors are multiplied, etc.).

Because of this issue, we basically cannot use ordering from LightSpeed for many of our suppliers.  It is a huge headache.  Many other people have complained about this for years now.

Inventory Count Tools Are Near Useless

With 1500 different products, the existing inventory counting tools in LightSpeed Retail POS (version 3.8.1.0) are useless.  They give you one tool, "Count Inventory", which requires that you enter a count for every one of your items.  Your are expected to do this in one small window.  The interface bogs down very badly with this many items.  It doesn't support any sane model of inventory counting, where you count one department (LightSpeed Class or Family) at a time.

What we need is a transactional document for each inventory adjustment.  This inventory adjustment needs to be given a reason and a date, and that reason needs to be passed through to the accounting (General Ledger or GL) system as a memo.  This allows for proper accounting due to theft (very important after a shoplifting event), and also end of year inventory.

You can export all your items to a spreadsheet, then filter by department (class / family), then enter a new column with your counts, then re-import the spreadsheet, but this is impossible for retail staff to do. It requires an IT consultant.  Our retail staff should not need to know how to manipulate .csv files or have the privilege to do mass product imports which can easily nuke all your data.

Magento Web Store Integration Is Half Baked

Also take a look at our article on the promise and shortcomings of Lightspeed Retail POS integration with Magento web store.  It is clear this functionality is not quite ready for enterprise use.