You've just opened your new Cafe, Restaurant or Bar and you've worked with our Account Management Team to build your menu, run through your POS workflows and have our Support Team help you connect your printers & payment terminals and you realise that you have to connect Lightspeed to your Xero Accounting software.

Thankfully, there is a lot of complex terminology but it's pretty straight forward.

Prior Reading

For information on how to configure the integration in Lightspeed, view the Setup Guide here.

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What accounts do I actually need?

Make sure that the following accounts are created in Xero before you set up the integration.

You don’t actually need to pick these numbers but the first number from the 3 digits, Example 2 in Sales-Lightspeed defines the category its from in Xero.

How do I actually create accounts in Xero?

Login into Xero and go to Accounting, then Chart of Accounts:

In order to add an account go and click Add Account:

So you're getting me to create all of these accounts, what do they mean?

Lightspeed Sales

Create or repurpose an existing account to use as your default sales account, this is where we are going to export all of your daily Sales revenue unless you choose to configure your setup via Product Account Code Mapping or Export via Reporting Groups.

Lightspeed Variance

This is a Liability account to track Reconciliation variances. When your staff make minor mistakes and their counted amount does not match the Recorded tally at the end of the day, the difference is going to be stored in this account. Tick “Show on Dashboard Watchlist” so you can keep track of variances. Default tax code: BAS Excluded.

Lightspeed Cash Clearing

This is the box where all of your cash payment data goes too, in other words, whenever you hit the cash button on the POS.

Note: This isn’t your bank deposits, Kounta doesn’t control this. This is just the RAW cash amount based on what the staff have keyed through the POS in that Reconciliation Period.

Lightspeed EFTPOS & Credit Cards Clearing

This is the other box where all of your card payment data goes too, in other words, whenever you process a Tyro, Westpac, Albert payment (or if you’re one of those people, and still use Manual Payments - that goes here too)

Note: This isn’t your bank feed. Your bank will have the option to feed the daily transactions into your Xero, this isn’t that. Your payment provider (eg: Tyro) will deposit their figures into your bank which determines what’s included in the bank feed.

Lightspeed is just sending the RAW payment amount based on what the staff have keyed through the POS in that Reconciliation Period, so if they are different, then check your Settlement period for your Eftpos Terminals.

Tips - Lightspeed

If tips are not distributed at the end of the trading day to your employees, they will be recorded against this account.

Xero Integration Frequently Asked Questions

What are these Prepayment things?

A prepayments entire purpose is to balance out the invoice for;

• Payments that are included in your takings for sales that are yet to be closed/completed

• The remaining difference between the final sale amount and the payment made during that takings period.

There are two kinds of prepayments.

A Pre-Payment Out is the difference between the final sale and payment. 
A Pre-Payment In is a part payment on an unpaid order ( Split Payments, Online Orders that have not been marked as Ready)

Note: No, there isn’t a Report for you to find these in Lightspeed but you shouldn’t need to, you just need to know that they aren’t wrong and they are there because you have more/less payments on that day's takings invoice, subsequent days will balance themselves out once the sale is completed. 

What are the differences between Draft & Approved?

When pushing through Reconciliation invoices to Xero, you have the options to export in one of 2 ways;

• Draft

• Approved

Draft exports your Reconciliation invoice as a $0 Draft invoices, your Payments will be written to the invoice as negative line items and your Revenue will be written as positive line items (balancing out the invoice to $0). Draft is an invoice in an unfinalised state, so everything can be changed.

Approved is just taking your Draft invoice above and instead of having negative line items for Payments, it applied actual payments to the invoice in Xero which moves it from a draft state into Approved. This means that the invoice is finalized, you can’t make any edits (you can only void).

Use this method only if you want to set and forget, and you don’t wish to make any adjustments later.

I have setup a daily Xero sync email, can this be changed to another user?

The email currently goes to the user who enabled/connected the integration, we are exploring the ability to add multiple users at a later date. 

I forgot to connect the integration when I started trading, how far can I backdate?

There is a max synchronisation date you can go back to is 30 days, this is currently a hard limit and it's unable to be changed. 

I am seeing an error 'Payments cannot sync back to Reconciliation Invoices'

If you make changes to Reconciliation Invoices in Xero after they have been pushed from Lightspeed to Xero, they will not sync back to Lightspeed. You will just get an error notification telling you “That your payments made in Xero can’t sync back to the Kounta Reconciliation report because it’s a locked report'.

This is expected because your Reconciliation Reports are just finalised summaries of your daily takings and not orders, you can safely ignore these errors.

Why is the integration telling me 'I'm not Authorised?'

This error doesn't generally mean that you don't have the right permissions, the most common reason for this error is because the browser that is being used with the Integration isn't Google Chrome. If after using Chrome you are still experiencing the issue.

Select 'Help & Support' and 'Chat with the Support Team' and our team can help.

I just created a new Clearing Account but when I check the Integration it isn't showing as available, why?

1. In the Accounting menu, select Advanced, then click Chart of accounts.
2. Click the account to open its details.
3. Select Enable payments to this account.
4. Click Save.

What is the difference between Income & Payments?

Income is the Recorded figure from your Reconciliation (End of Day Takings) report, this is the total for all the closed and finalised sales transactions during that takings period. 

Payments is the Counted figure, this figure shows how many payments have actually been collected during that day. 

Differences can occur between these figures when part-payments are takings for sales that are yet to be completed, these will show in your Xero invoice in the form of Prepayments.