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LightSpeed is a registered trademark of LightSpeed, 7049 St-Urbain Montreal, Quebec, Canada H2S 3H4
LightSpeed Retail
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LightSpeed is a registered trademark of LightSpeed, 7049 St-Urbain Montreal, Quebec, Canada H2S 3H4
LightSpeed Pro Point-of-Sale
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LightSpeed is a registered trademark of LightSpeed, 7049 St-Urbain Montreal, Quebec, Canada H2S 3H4
LightSpeed Pro
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LightSpeed is a registered trademark of LightSpeed, 7049 St-Urbain Montreal, Quebec, Canada H2S 3H4
LightSpeed iPad POS
My experience with LightSpeed comes mostly from a high end retailer (with a more than 75 year history) who wanted an ‘all Mac’ solution for their storefront and back office. They were more than satisfied with QuickBooks for Mac, they had been running it for a couple of years, but wanted to find a Point-of-Sale solution. When I first heard of LightSpeed I wondered if this was the answer. After some research and a d emo I realized it was a beautiful work in the making. That was four years ago. So here is what you can expect if you decided that LightSpeed might be the solution you have been looking for.
LightSpeed Pro Point-of-Sale for Mac is a complete point of sale solution for retailers who need point of sale and back-office tools for management and analysis. (Figure 2) You easily simplify your workflows and focus on what’s really important: giving your customers the best experience possible. Inventory, ordering, invoicing, reporting … LightSpeed Pro does it. This product combines all of the functionality required to manage a retail store so you can spend less time reviewing data and more time building your retail business and servicing your customers.
LightSpeed transforms your front counter with a powerful and intuitive Mac-based Point-of-Sale that gives your salespeople the tools they need to sell more and satisfy customers, within an Apple-beautiful interface that organizes information and streamlines their workflow. (Figure 3) Create sales receipts, quotes and invoices in seconds with drag and drop simplicity, or barcode scanning. Click once to convert any quote into an order, to request stock or a sale to complete the purchase. My retail client needed a solution that was streamlined enough to allow them to quickly produce a sales ticket for routine merchandise, while at the same time robust enough to give them the ability to place custom 'made-to-measure' orders, LightSpeed met this requirement.
It's easy to demonstrate to your customers that special care you want them to know from your retail business by taking advantage of LightSpeed Pro's unique features to track, manage, and stay in touch with your customers. Easily use LightSpeed information to send customer's notices of an upcomming sale, promotional pricing, or new merchandise. The LightSpeed Pro customer profile captures and organizes customer information, giving you instant access to individual contacts, credit limits, tax preferences as well as an accurate history of each customer's calls, transactions and purchases. My retailer not only wanted to know who their best customers were, but the types and specific merchandise that made them their best customers, again LightSpeed provided the data my client was expecting to see from a new Point-of-sale system.
Use accurate and informed pricing strategies to increase profit margins. Track the precise value of your current inventory. Update the supplier costs and prices for entire classes of products, based on supplier, category, brand, and other factors your select. Create as many as 10 alternate prices for each product, to quickly adjust to specific customers or situations such as one-day sales, promotional opportunities, or close-out merchandise. Create rules that automatically apply new pricing factors when your predefined criteria are met. For example my client could easily discount seasonal inventory not only at the end of season, but as the season progressed.
Clothing or apparel stores can create style based size-color combinations to simplify ordering, receiving, selling, and reporting. My retail client uses this feature for both men's and women's shoes they offer, it also works for some clothing items that are offered not only in sizes of course, but the same materials in different patterns..
Powerful inventory and purchasing tools reduce effort, inefficiency and waste. Track inventory and serialized products with precision as they move through your store and warehouse locations. Re-order points prompt you when product levels run low. LightSpeed’s "one-click" purchasing process allows you to produce stock orders and back-orders and even change suppliers on the fly. Receive an entire purchase order, reserve product for back-orders, and print labels for everything you receive. Transfer stock from your store's inventory to one of ten 'stockpiles' (location, demo category, close-out, special promotions, etc.).
LightSpeed Pro for iPad POS brings the LightSpeed Point of Sale experience to Apple's iPad tablet platform, allowing you to showcase your products and process transactions anywhere. (Figure 4) The LightSpeed iPad Point-of-Sale system combines the benefits of personalized selling with inventory scanning, wireless payments and the retail workflows of LightSpeed Pro. Their iPad Point-of-Sale integrates fully with LightSpeed Pro, to provide a complete solution for retailers seeking a system based around Apple hardware. The LightSpeed Pro family of retail point of sale products offers powerful inventory and streamlined workflows for Mac, Mobile and eCommerce. One reason my client liked LightSpeed so well was the clean appearance it offered when you combined the POS equipment with their Mac. LightSpeed also offers a variety of hardware for both Mac and iPad users, you can learn more about their hardware offerings from their products website.
LightSpeed Pro's easy-to-configure and simple-to-maintain multi-store POS functionality allows retailers to expand to multiple locations and offer the same kind of chain-store conveniences and personalized service to customers you would expect from a 'small store' gone 'multi-location' retailer. Cross-store inventory tracking and reporting allow store managers and purchasers to know where their inventory is located to make critical decisions regarding transferring of stock or future purchases. Cross-store sales reports allow business owners and managers to generate consolidated reports on sales performance across the chain. One of the 'weakest' elements of QuickBooks on Point-of-sale has been multi-store problems associated with their continuing 'mail-bag' style reporting from stores to headquarters.
LightSpeed Pro offers retailers a choice of industry-leading credit card processing partners so that you have the power to select the best terms and rates for your business. You are not limited to a single merchant service, like with many Point-of-sale products. The credit-card processing offered also permits a variety of gift card and gift certificate options which can be very important in many retail businesses.
LightSpeed allows you to maintain that accounting you have been using on your Mac by providing integration with QuickBooks for Mac using a simple 2-click process to send invoices, payments and supplier invoices to QuickBooks eliminating missed or duplicate data. Click once in LightSpeed Pro to prepare the export file; then click once in QuickBooks to import the iiF file from LightSpeed Pro. While I am not a big fan of iiF import of data, this hasn't seemed to be an issue for my client. The LightSpeed Pro export log keeps a detailed history of every export for purposes of reconciliation or tracking in the event of any discrepancy should arise.
LightSpeed is growing and maturing, at almost light speed, they now offer a Cloud-based POS designed to connect you anywhere using iPad, but that’s a topic for a future article.
Getting back to my client, they loved the look of LightSpeed from day one, and after their demo they were on-board within a few short days. It took us a bit of time to set-up and configure, but once it was working and they were trained, their ‘old ways’ of hand-written sales receipts and a cash-register were long past. As soon as the LightSpeed iPad solution came on-board my client implemented it for their ‘custom (fit-to-measure) sales’, they also now use it for their ‘market purchases’.
There has never been any problem for my client with integrating their LightSpeed POS data into their QuickBooks for Mac, it seems to go smoothly at the end of every day's close. Since this is a single retail location, I can't speak first hand concerning LightSpeed's multi-store functionality or cloud-based offerings, but if they are as 'perfected' as the desktop and iPad products they should run without a hitch.
All in all Light Speed has taken my retail client from the days of old into a future they (or I) could hardly imagine. If you are looking for an ‘all Mac’ POS and accounting solution, I am confident that LightSpeed POS coupled with QuickBooks for Mac can do the same for you, or your retail clients.
See the LightSpeed website for more information about their complete product line and POS alternatives.
LightSpeed is a registered trademark of LightSpeed, 7049 St-Urbain Montreal, Quebec, Canada H2S 3H4