Lightspeed Retail

Pros

The best feature of LIghtspeed is the analytics package. As a senior manager you can spend a lot of time calculating your performance manually in excel. But the Analytics package takes care of all of that. It's easy to see the performance of your inventory, employees and marketing at any time. There are also a lot of apps that work with Lightspeed that make it the most functional POS system I've used. The fact that the ecommerce is integrated as well makes it a great fully integrated system. You could pay a lot more to piece together all the of the systems you need. Or you could spend a huge amount of money creating a custom system.

Cons

There are some small idiosyncrasies like not adjusting sync times for your local time zone. So, yesterday is never accurate you have to wait for the next days sync to get have accurate information. I would also like to be able to have our time management app sync employee time to Lightspeed so we don't have to enter it manually. I've given up on tracking employee hourly performance for this reason. Or if they offered a better time clock management natively that would help. I'd also like them to include the previous year comparisons in their dashboard. And, I'd like to look at seasonal performance rather than just month to month and week to week.

Alternatives Considered

Reasons for Choosing Lightspeed Retail

Switched From

Reasons for Switching to Lightspeed Retail

Pros

I tinkered with this software and got ot know this from the inside and out. I like the functionalities as it allows you to break free from the spreadsheet and manual entry. Gone are the days of tallying and doing adjustments on a piece of paper. It has filter functions for reporting, it auto calculates taxes by assigning it in the initial setup, browser printing integration, you can conveniently import inventory from a csv file to your POS system and export those reports in a csv format. The hardware associated to it works seamlessly like the tablets, scanners, and printers. Although , it endorses Apple products, it works perfectly fine with Windows operating systems. It also has a companion product which is called Lightspeed Accounting that is comparable to Quickbooks

Cons

A few bugs are slowly being fixed as each maintenance and update is released, just like any other software. Although workarounds can be done to remedy it, but you'd have to seek assistance from Tech Support.

Alternatives Considered

Reasons for Switching to Lightspeed Retail

Pros

Initially we had problems getting support because they were very short-staffed. However they have done a lot to improve this aspect and I am confident that every time we call our support person will respond quickly and be able to solve our problem.

Cons

It was a little more difficult to implement than some other systems, so more of a learning curve for users. Also there are some product features that have some limitations at the moment but I think they will be resolved.

Pros

Looks nice if you spend the time to set it up

Cons

Lightspeed has been a horror for us since the start. What we were presented at during the sales meeting made us very excited and happy, but the second the contract was signed, for our 3 locations everything went down hill. I had to pull teeth and send multiple messages and to get our installation done on time. And even at that they finished doing it opening day, and were debugging while we had to serve clients. And that is a whole other story.

The product itself looks good but really does not work for a restaurant. Little things like having a single client pay without closing the full table is not possible. Servers need to figure out all these ways/trick to speed up service without being slowed down by Lightspeed. Items cannot be sent to multiple locations at ones (if something come from both the kitchen and bar like a Caeser with bacon)

The reports are terrible. Items are split up in ways were the they are split if clients have payed 1/2 or 1/3 of the amount. So items like Natchos that are group type items, to no how many have been sold you need to add the full one, the 1/2, 1/3, 1/4, 1/6, .... amounts. So extracting any information takes a long time. Many of the reports have numerical errors in them, and as such they cannot be trusted. Also, tyring to export hourly sales or receipts all have wrong times on them (our restaurant closes at 1am, yet it still show receipts until 5am)

It is not possible to use the inventory option in bar because they can only have units, it

Pros

Ease of use. Easy to train. Cloud based system makes bookkeeping super easy. Integration with moneris.

Cons

Bill splitting can be a little more intuitive. Would not let me edit labour hours once uploaded to cloud which I found weird. Some type of emergency offline back-up would be helpful as well.

Alternatives Considered

Reasons for Switching to Lightspeed Retail