Lightspeed Retail serves as a comprehensive point-of-sale and customer loyalty platform designed to help businesses of all sizes streamline their operations. The Unleashed-Lightspeed integration addresses one of retail's most persistent pain points: maintaining real-time stock accuracy across all sales channels. Whether you're operating a single storefront or managing multiple retail locations alongside wholesale operations, this integration ensures your inventory data remains synchronized and accurate across both platforms.
At its core, this integration transforms how retailers manage their operations by providing true stock management in real-time. When a sale occurs in Lightspeed, your Unleashed inventory automatically updates, eliminating the manual processes and potential errors that come with managing separate systems.
Tutorial Video
Unleashed and Lightspeed integration
Key benefits of the Lightspeed integration
Real-Time Stock Synchronization: The most immediate benefit retailers experience is the automatic updating of stock levels in Lightspeed directly from Unleashed. This real-time synchronization means your staff always has access to accurate inventory information, preventing overselling and improving customer satisfaction.
Enhanced Margin Visibility: Access to accurate profit margins across all sales channels becomes effortless when calculations are based on landed costs computed in Unleashed. This visibility empowers better pricing decisions and helps identify your most profitable products and channels.
Streamlined Financial Management: All stock movements automatically flow to your accounting provider, covering sales transactions, cost of goods sold, and stock on hand updates. This automation reduces manual data entry and minimizes accounting errors.
Unified Sales Reporting: Gain a complete view of your business performance with centralized sales figures that encompass both retail and wholesale channels. This comprehensive reporting enables better strategic decision-making and more accurate forecasting.
Multi-Location Support: For businesses with multiple outlets, sales orders from all locations seamlessly flow into Unleashed, providing centralized inventory control while maintaining the flexibility of distributed sales operations.
Integration flow descriptions
The integration creates bidirectional data flow, though some aspects are configurable based on your business needs.
Integrated data | Description |
Products | Unleashed imports products from Lightspeed. Setting Unleashed to export product details back into Lightspeed is optional. When a product is marked as obsolete in Unleashed, it will not be marked as obsolete in Lightspeed. Product names cannot be updated in Lightspeed. |
Customers | Unleashed imports customer details from Lightspeed. Setting Unleashed to export customer details back into Lightspeed is optional. |
Stock on Hand | Setting Unleashed to export Stock on Hand (SOH) availability to Lightspeed is optional. |
Sales | Closed sales in Lightspeed are imported into Unleashed. The status of sales that will import into Unleashed are:
Sales will import to Unleashed within 5 to 15 minutes of the sale closing in Lightspeed. |
Never Diminishing Products
Products marked as Never Diminishing in Unleashed will sync to Lightspeed as standard stock-tracked items. You can manually adjust the stock tracking setting in Lightspeed to align with your Unleashed configuration.
Serial and Batch Tracked Items
Sales orders containing serialized or batch-tracked products import with a "Parked" status, requiring manual allocation of specific batch or serial numbers in Unleashed before completion. This ensures complete traceability while maintaining the accuracy required for these specialized products.
Product variants
One of the integration's sophisticated features is its handling of product variants. In Lightspeed, products can have multiple variants representing different sizes, colors, or styles. Each variant maintains the same product name and handle but requires a unique SKU for successful synchronization.
When you connect your systems, each product variant creates a corresponding unique product code in Unleashed. This one-to-one relationship ensures accurate tracking while maintaining the organizational structure that makes sense for your business.
For optimal results, avoid using spaces in SKUs or product codes, as these are removed during export to Lightspeed, potentially creating mismatches between systems.
Size | Colour | SKU |
12 | Black | 1001 |
14 | Black | 1002 |
12 | Blue | 1003 |
14 | Blue | 1004 |
Points to note
The details in this help file are accurate at the time of writing. However, from time to time Lightspeed may make further changes that are unknown to Unleashed.
Unlike other integrations with Unleashed, information is shared between the two systems by using the Unleashed API.
We do not recommend using Lay-by sales in Lightspeed as they can create a stock variance between the Unleashed and Lightspeed systems. This is because Lightspeed removes the quantity that is on lay-by whilst Unleashed does not.
Sales Returns/Credits will not be imported into Unleashed as they're processed in Lightspeed as a negative Invoice that Unleashed will not recognise. Lightspeed's Returns/Credits will need to be manually entered as Credit Notes in Unleashed if they are to be recorded in both systems.
After the integration, sales reports and product reports within Lightspeed will not accurately reflect the costs of goods any more.
Product pricing cannot be sent to the tax inclusive field in Lightspeed, it is only sent to the product's tax exclusive field. This means that you need to set up all your retail pricing in Unleashed as tax exclusive.
Before you integrate
Before connecting your systems:
Ensure both Lightspeed and Unleashed use the same base currency to prevent integration issues.
If you're using multiple e-commerce platforms like Shopify alongside Lightspeed, integrate each platform directly with Unleashed rather than connecting them. This approach ensures optimal stock availability accuracy across all channels.
Initially disable customer export, product export, and stock on hand export configurations in Unleashed to prevent overriding existing Lightspeed data during setup.
Layby sales in Lightspeed should be used cautiously, as they can create stock variances between systems. Lightspeed removes layby quantities from available stock while Unleashed does not, potentially leading to discrepancies.
Sales returns and credits require manual processing, as these appear as negative invoices in Lightspeed that Unleashed doesn't recognize automatically.
After integration, cost reporting within Lightspeed may not reflect the accurate cost of goods, as this information becomes managed through Unleashed.