You need to refund a product or a whole order on Lightspeed POS and don't know where to look? Or perhaps you need to keep your staff accountable and track the refunds that are getting entered in POS.
What's in this guide?
Before you begin
You don't need any special settings for processing refunds. However, you'd need to enable the Refund Reasons add-on to enable staff to select the reason why the customer asked for the refund.
The refund reasons that staff choose from can also be customised from the Back Office.
How to Refund an Order (or just an Item)
Once you have made a sale on the POS, you can follow these steps to perform a refund of either a whole order or, just part of an order;
1. Open the POS
2. Please select your user account so you are on the main POS Selling screen
3. Open the left-hand side POS Menu
4. Click on History
4. You can now use our search tool to find the order that you wish. Please use this tool to find the order you wish.
5. You will now see a big red Refund Sale button appear in the bottom right of the POS screen - Select this button.
6. A prompt for the order will appear - Select Refund Sale
7. If you only have one item on this order you will then be prompted for the refund reason now - otherwise, skip to Refund a Part Order
Note - With the Refund Reasons add-on, you can customise the options below
8. Select which account you are refunding to;
Refund a Part Order
7. (yes, we skipped from the above step 7) - On an order that has more than one item, you will be prompted to refund either the whole order or selected items;
- Refund All (orange button) - Will refund everything on this order
- Refund specific items by clicking on them to move them to the To Refund: column
8. Select continue to refund these items.
7. Select your reason for refunding this order
Remember - if you are using the Refund Reasons add-on you can also customise these options
8. Select which account you are refunding to;
Refund a past order
The history tab on the POS has this data - simply change to the date range you need and click Filter (the big orange button).
Then follow the steps from Refund an order above
Pro Tip - If the item they have returned cannot be re-sold you should enter it as Wastage to keep your stock levels accurate.
Pro Tip -If you are refunding a sale that was generated by an add-on (such as Mobi2Go or HeyYou) you may also need to follow a return procedure for that add-on.
View Refunds Report
Using Insights
Insights analyses your data and serves it to you in simple, bite-sized dashboards.
Refunds can be seen from two dashboards.
The first is the Staff Performance Dashboard on Insights.
From there, select Staff Overview. Scroll down to Staff by Most Refunded - here, you can see the staff members ranked by the amount of refunds they processed within a given time.
The second one is the Reconciliations Dashboard.
From there, select Site Reconciliations Overview. Scroll down to Payment method deep dive and you'll be able to see the amount of refunds given for each payment method.
In Back Office
From the Back Office, you can find a dedicated report containing real-time data on Refunds.
1. Under Reports from the Back Office, select Refunds
Use the filter to display reports based on timeframe, site, staff, or register.
Note - The above report is only available if you have the Refund Reasons add-on enabled.
Another report you can refer to is the Audit report which shows the employee, returned item, and returned amount for a given timeframe.
1. Under Reports from the Back Office, select Audit
On the Point of Sale
You can also view refunds from the Sales History on the Point of Sale.
1. From the Point of Sale, select History on the right-hand corner
2. Select Sales and select the right time frame.
Frequently Asked Questions
Do I need to pay for the Refund Reasons Add-on?
Add-ons are included with different Lightspeed Plans - so check if this one is already included with yours.
If you need a plan upgrade, it's a fine day for a power-up! Talk to us.
I can't see the Refund Sale button?
The number 1 reason is that you may not have the correct permissions on your account to perform refunds. Check with your manager or ensure that you are signing in with the correct user on the POS.
More info on User Permissions can be found here.
Does Lightspeed allow the deletion of finalised sales?
No. Once a sale has been cashed off and finalised, any corrections can only occur as a full or partial refund - both can be permanently tracked within your Lightspeed reporting.
Can I enter reasons why orders were deleted?
No. Deleting orders is for when you make a mistake and there was no financial impact to the business. For any other reason, there are appropriate features, i.e. Wastage or Adjustments.
For example, in any table-service business, no users should have permission to delete held orders due to security risks. If a held order is no longer needed, it should be discounted to $0 and cashed off, or, put through as wastage. If it's partial held order, split the products first.
What's my next step?
Well now you know how to enter refunds and voids, you should also look at how to track these in the back office using the Refunds Report
Need to check on your staff's permission settings? Then you should head over to our guide on Managing User Permissions