Staff error, food sent back to the kitchen, expired ingredients, missing stock items, unsold inventory - there are various reasons why wastage happens. The first step to managing wastage is to know the full story.
Empower your staff to record how much gets wasted, who wasted what, and why it was wasted -with the Wastage Add-on. You will also instantly see the monetary equivalent of each wastage.
You can automatically update your stock count with each wastage and generate reports focused on wastage. In time you can get the holistic data you need to drive your own action plan to reduce wastage.
Watch how it works in this video.
In this guide, we will cover how wastage can be recorded and tracked.
What’s in this guide?
From POS | From Back Office | Using Insights
Enable the Wastage add-on
1. From the Features Page in Lightspeed Back Office, find the Wastage add-on
2. Enable this Feature by clicking on the blue Enable button
Record Wastage
Wastage can be recorded from both the POS and Back Office easily.
From POS
1. On your Lightspeed POS, select the menu icon on the left side of the screen.
2. Select Add-ons
3. Select Wastage
4. Fill out the product wasted, the reason, and how much was wasted
Pro Tip - If an ingredient such as flour was wasted, make sure to use the same unit of measurement as set in the Recipe Builder - if a fraction of the whole ingredient (e.g. fraction of the 1kg flour) was wasted, use decimal points.
The reason for wastage can be selected from the following:
5. Select Record Wastage
From Back Office
1. In the Back Office, select Sites (If you have multiple sites, you will first need to select which site. Select My Site for single sites.
2. Select Wastage
3. Select Record Wastage
4. Fill out the date, the product wasted, the reason, and how much was wasted.
Pro Tip - If a stock ingredient such as flour is wasted, make sure to enter just the wasted amount
Eg. 500g of a 1Kg bag, enter as a quantity of 0.5
5. Select Save Wastage
Track Wastage
Wastage can be tracked from both the POS and Back Office easily.
From POS
1. Head over to the Wastage page under add-ons on your POS.
2. Select Wastage
3. Select Wastage History
4. It should look like this.
Here we have two separate wastage incidents. Note that the sugar was entered in decimal form to match its quantity in inventory which is 1kg. Meanwhile, bacon and egg panini is entered as “1” because it is a regular product.
From Back Office
The Back Office report on wastage is a bit more basic - it offers a tip-of-the-iceberg view of your wastage. To see more trends and to uncover the deeper root of wastage, Wastage Insights offers rich and interactive data that gets rid of the guesswork.
1. In the Back Office, select Reports (If you have multiple sites, you will first need to select which site.)
2. Select Wastage
3. You can filter the results based on timeframe. The report will look like this.
Using Lightspeed Insights
Better decisions every day, with Insights. Insights captures your data and puts it to work. Drilldown into the wastage data by date, by staff, by reporting group, and more. Want to reduce your wastage cost but don't know where to start? Find the answers on the Wastage Dashboard.
Frequently Asked Questions
Why do I need to track wastage?
Knowing the full story of why discrepancies happen can help you to optimise processes so that less and less wastage would occur in your business.
If you have Lightspeed Insights enabled, this will feed data to your Wastage Dashboard - giving you deep insight from Wastage data trends. Know WHY the wastage happened, WHO wasted it, and HOW MUCH was lost in sales.
What will happen to my stocks when I record wastage?
This add-on also updates your Stock Count report while also generating its own separate report if you want to focus on wastage. It will deduct the quantity of the product that was recorded on your wastage from your stock count report.
What if I incorrectly recorded wastage?
You can correct or reverse your stock on hand by updating your stock take sheet. To do this, go to Inventory menu, select the Stock Count tab and perform a stock take.
What if I refunded an item or an order, should I still record that as wastage?
If there are items on the order that are perishable, you will need to record it separately as wastage. If the items are non-perishable, refunding the order will update the stock count automatically by adding it back to stock.
Can I add customised Wastage Reasons?
This feature is not available but widely used wastage reasons have been provided.
Do I need to pay for the Wastage 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.
What are my next steps?
- Now that you've empowered your staff to record wastage, you can use the data to help your business grow. View this article to learn more about the Wastage Dashboard, an interactive report showing why and how wastage happens and the prevailing Wastage trends. The sooner you know why the problem happens, the sooner you can act on solving it!
- Stock levels on Lightspeed automatically sync with your purchases, sales, and wastage so that inventory management reaches a whole new level of ease. If you do regular stocktaking, you can also manually update your stock. View this article to learn how to do Stock Counts.
- Why purchase more of a stock item that another store location has a surplus of? Given enough time, surplus stocks will end up in the bin - contributing to wastage. View this article to learn how to set up Stock Transfers so you can reduce wastage by empowering your locations to share inventory.