WSW Migrating QBPOS to Lightspeed - Wrapping Up and End of Day
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[00:00:00] [00:00:30]
[00:00:38] Dan DeLong: Welcome to yet another Workshop Wednesdays, which is Casual Conversations for Serious Workflows brought to you by School of Bookkeeping. com. So again, we're joined with KG today from Lightspeed, which is what we've been doing over the past four workshops, which is really just talking about this trigger event, which [00:01:00] was the discontinuation of.
QuickBooks point of sale, which has caused retailers to go scattering, I guess it's probably the, we talked about it a little last week where this is like a grudge purchase where QuickBooks point of sale customers are what do I do at this point?
And do they decide to stay? Did they, if they stay in QuickBooks point of sale, what are they going to? Experience and for those that are looking for to come out of the doldrums of desktop [00:01:30] retail software light speed is one of the options that are there. KG, thanks again for joining us.
This should be our last workshop discussion. Really appreciate your your apartment there in the background, but it's not really your apartment.
[00:01:45] KG: It could be. If I was in a sunny place.
[00:01:49] Dan DeLong: But you're in Canada. Yes. Canada, right?
[00:01:52] KG: Just north of the border, yes.
[00:01:54] Dan DeLong: Doesn't look like that today outside, does it?
Absolutely
[00:01:58] KG: not, no. It's it's, we're [00:02:00] going through what we consider like that. That happy before the storm. It's not cold, not freezing, but it's cold enough, but as soon it will be covered in everything
[00:02:09] Dan DeLong: white. When is that normally in your neck of the woods? Is that February, March? I would say,
[00:02:17] KG: yeah, February is probably the coldest month.
So it's probably going to be about to get, cold enough to freeze the lake,
[00:02:22] Dan DeLong: Okay. Get ready for ice fishing, right? Indeed. In our small town. I can just go to the [00:02:30] refrigerator and fish my own ice. Yeah.
[00:02:32] KG: In our town here we have our polar bear dip. So every year they cut out a big square in the frozen lake and everyone just starts diving in.
So that's going to be a
[00:02:41] Dan DeLong: thing. Have you done that? I
[00:02:43] KG: did it last year, yes.
[00:02:44] Dan DeLong: Exhilarating. Oh, the polar plunge. Yes. A lot of good times. Better you than me. Next time.
[00:02:51] KG: I'll invite
[00:02:52] Dan DeLong: you. All right. Yeah. All right. So we're wrapping up this series and in, in migrating from QuickBooks point of sale to [00:03:00] light speed, because the main thing we want people to know is, there are other options that are out there.
And what is it, what is your experience going to be like going from one, one platform to the other? And when we talked about, the major differences between the two, one is a desktop software. You have to download, install, backup. Store data have a network where we're light speed. I'll leave that to you.
KG. It's what do you have to download and install? Nothing, right?
[00:03:28] KG: [00:03:30] Yeah, unless you're using an iPad, which is an app in this case, everything else is a web browser. So you go to your specific domain. Log in and you're in your register and you're in your back office all in one.
[00:03:45] Dan DeLong: So real easy to get started or implemented with, up and running in light speed, the hardware is one of the other things that I really like about light speed is if you're using QuickBooks point of sale hardware, chances are.
All [00:04:00] of that hardware is compatible with with QuickBooks or with Lightspeed, trying to say, getting my tongues my, my software crisscrossed there, but but your Lightspeed hardware bundle is essentially. Similar to to what they're already using, right?
[00:04:16] KG: Correct. Yeah. What we've seen is a lot of companies that are using QuickBooks desktop or QuickBooks point of sale are essentially using are supported hardware already.
So that's the one huge hurdle for them not to have to jump over, which is buying new [00:04:30] hardware and having to reinstall everything. Most everything is plug and play.
Got
[00:04:34] Dan DeLong: it. Great. So that's, one thing to consider when considering, an alternative that's out there because that's you'd have to rebuy that sort of thing if you needed to transition, but since this is the last one and the end of workshops, we wanted to talk about the end of day procedure, which is something that's unique to retailers in general that we want to talk about.
You know what that looks like in QuickBooks point of [00:05:00] sale and how that would transition to, to Lightspeed point of sale. The end of day is more of a retail terminology where the close, you're thinking like before. Before software came into the, to the picture, your your end of day procedure, you've got a cash register over, ringing up sales throughout the day and you want to basically start over the next day, right?
So you've got cash that you want to take out. You want to leave it. Till, which is, the [00:05:30] change that you want to leave into the cash register the next day, and then you want to take all that cash and take it to the bank, right? QuickBooks QuickBooks Point of Sale will group, what it calls its end of day procedure, which is one doing, running your end of day reports, which is either your X out report, your Z out report, or Z out drawer count report which you're running those reports to, to close out the register to do that task of Zeroing out your cash register [00:06:00] till for the end of the for the next day, to be ready for the next day.
But then it does some other tasks that are grouped together as part of that end of day, it'll back up the data, right? So now that you've, you've ended your day, you want to back it up to make sure that, if there's a power outage or something like that and you want to restore it to that point, you can.
You have a restore point to go back to. If you're in a multi store type of situation there will be a store exchange process, which is sending [00:06:30] information to to your remote locations. And they'll be sending Their information back to the headquarters to make sure that all of the workstations and computers are on the same page when it comes to transactional activity that needs to go from one to the other.
And the last thing is send it all to QuickBooks, right? QuickBooks. QuickBooks point of sale calls it financial exchanges, which will then take that information, all that information that you've done throughout the day to all your different stores and send it to [00:07:00] QuickBooks. So those four major activities are done during the end of day.
They're all individual activities that can be run. Independently of that, but typically you would just do that at the end of the day for Lightspeed customers. Toss the question over to KG. What do they have to do at the end of the day when it comes to close out of the register and those types of things?
[00:07:27] KG: Great question. On our end, you go through your day to day [00:07:30] as regular. You open your cash register, enter in the amount of money that you have in your till, and you go through your sales date. At the end of the day, there's a little button on the left side that shows open and close register. So when you close it out, once you have integrated payments, all your methods of payment should be automatically filled in.
You count your cash out, enter in that number. As soon as you press submit, the end of day register will send a report into QuickBooks online or desktop. Automatically one, just based off of what you said, that sounds like a long period. I'm not sure exactly how [00:08:00] long that would take per day. If you could summarize, like, how long would
[00:08:03] Dan DeLong: that take normally?
The longest part is, counting the cash, right? Because, in the Z out drawer count report there's places to put all of the denominations of what they have, so they're going to count out their quarters and say, I have 42 quarters. And then it will do the math of how much that actually is of what they're leaving.
Does light speed offer that as well, as far as like the total amount or the actual denominations in the. It [00:08:30]
[00:08:31] KG: is the total that we'll do here, but like you said if counting cash is the longest part, that'd probably be the only thing. You don't have to, you don't have to download anything or import it anywhere.
It's automatic. The things that get transferred from the register closure is things like your sales, any discounts given gift card liability, till discrepancies. And I think the last one is the store credit. So all of that is transferred automatically into QuickBooks online or
[00:08:59] Dan DeLong: desktop. [00:09:00] Yeah, so it's as far as those other things like the store exchange, right?
So that's a That's a cycle, right? So it's there's going to be one storage change from the headquarters out to all of the remotes, and that can be set up individually per per register, or I'm sorry, per store, excuse me. And that has to go out, and then that has to be processed in, which, that, that could take, a minute to multiple minutes, for that process to happen one, they [00:09:30] have to send it and two, they have to receive it.
And then and then those stores process that in and then they reverse that process and send out a store exchange file back to the headquarters, which in the headquarters has to process in all of those individual files. So it's now one. Versus the other. Now there was a store exchange, Intuit store exchange online service which is one of those things that is no longer available for QuickBooks point of sale customers because it's an online [00:10:00] service, right?
So that made things a lot smoother with that process because they could just send it out and then there wasn't any file right for those Remote stores to find double click on lose, right? So all of those human Errors that could possibly take place during that store exchange process are eliminated from that but now they're back to the forefront because Four other methods are I send you a file like on a disc, which nobody's gonna do that.[00:10:30]
Mail it to you through email or have some kind of store exchange or network path where they could see the file between the two computers, right? , that ends up being a huge undertaking for the IT department, to be able to make that happen. So typically they're gonna mail it.
Yeah. In my email it, which in when I would work with the, those customers, they would even call it a mailbag, right? Because they're mailing it to, they're emailing it to their[00:11:00] to the remote stores and it's an attachment, double click on it. They bring it back in. So depending on the number of stores that's, one mailbag.
Times, however many stores that they have each time and then sending it back to the headquarters. So it could certainly be a long process where they're the store manager, especially the headquarters Waiting for those to come in and then processing those in yeah, and they have to do all that before they send it to quickbooks, right?
Yeah, and that [00:11:30] quick and that quickbooks is one it won't go to quickbooks online. So it's only desktop That it would do this with. And then that process would then, take however long that would be, which was typically, it's pretty quick. But not as not as long as instantaneous as or longer than instantaneous as you're talking about where you don't necessarily have to do anything with QuickBooks online and Lightspeed, right?
As soon as you hit the button it's sending that information over,
[00:11:58] KG: right? The [00:12:00] time that goes into, let's say you are saving a lot of time doing this process. Sending out that bag, for example, you could actually just dedicate that time to just proactively going into all your accounts.
And again, as an owner, you could just quickly log into the other locations and just make sure that everyone closed your register. Of course, when we were training, then people that are just onboarding, we always recommend, best practice open and close your register every single day. Let's say they forget next morning when they come in, it'll actually say, Hey, you forgot to close your register yesterday.
Do you want to close it now? So we'll remind them. [00:12:30] But again, best practice close your register every single day. But again, if you're an owner and you have a little bit of extra time, not having to do manual things, just go in, log into each location and you could see exactly who's left a register open.
You can close it from remotely from anywhere.
[00:12:44] Dan DeLong: Yeah. That in and of itself is a huge time saver, right? So being able to see those other stores from the headquarters without actually. One driving to those locations or trying to get ahold of somebody over there Hey, [00:13:00] did you close out your register?
They could actually just log in and see, because in the back office of Lightspeed, you can basically see all of your your locations. Now you call them outlets. Is that the correct? Is that the Lightspeed term?
[00:13:15] KG: Yeah, correct. So outlets would be considered a location and then registers are registers.
So one location could have 3, 4, 5 unlimited amount of registers. And then number of locations is what we consider outlets.
[00:13:27] Dan DeLong: So that's a, that's pretty huge time savings, comparing [00:13:30] the two between QuickBooks point of sale, which is again, beholden and limited by it's it's the fact that it is a desktop software and has all those limitations that are built into that where you have to, there's a file involved backup.
You don't have to back up. Is there cause good question. I think we may have talked about it before, but is there like a restore point with with the software with Lightspeed, so if something goes horribly wrong [00:14:00] and they want to go back to yesterday can they do that with Lightspeed or how does that work?
[00:14:05] KG: I want to say it's when something goes horribly wrong, internet cuts out, someone comes in and I don't know, breaks your desktop or something, whatever it may be. Regardless, every single time you do anything within the point of sale, it saves right away to the cloud. None of it is stored on your physical hardware.
It is stored on the cloud. So again, worst case scenario, let's say you're walking around with your iPad, drop it, breaks, log in on your laptop. [00:14:30] You're good to continue working. It'll continue where you left
[00:14:33] Dan DeLong: off. The scenario I'm thinking of is okay I need to update all my prices. And I'm going to use a, like an import process and in light speed to be able to do that.
Oh no, I duplicated my items. I just want to roll that back or undo that. Is there, is the, is there an option to do those types of things or I imported all my customers? And now they're duplicated. Is there an undo option with those imports [00:15:00] or is there an a rollback option with the data?
Good question.
[00:15:04] KG: There is no undo option when it comes to something like, let's say duplicates. We have a very smart system that'll show you all your duplicates and you can fuse them together. For example, if I entered in Dan DeLong as a customer, and then I upload a mass file, but it's Dan D. I noticed that they're the same and they both have their own on account balances.
I could actually fuse them together and it'll suggest those as well, based off of similarities in the name, email,
[00:15:29] Dan DeLong: or phone number. [00:15:30] So as you don't necessarily have a rollback or a restore point to go back to, you have built in checkpoints or things to correct. Avoid those situations from happening to, to begin with, like we, we used to always say we had this there was a thing in, in, in point of sale called the price manager and we call it the price mangler because that's what would happen is people would mess up their [00:16:00] prices.
And we always suggested to them, Hey, force a backup, before, before you do this. But they, the developers actually came up with a better way to do things. So to be able to just roll that back because. If you force a backup and then somebody is in the price manager and it's taking an hour and sales are happening, you don't necessarily want to go back to an hour ago, before that happens if you make a horrible dilemma with your [00:16:30] prices so they actually.
Did us one better by, by making it, and I think that's what you're referring to with, the developers of Lightspeed have thought of, or at least tried to think of all the ways that a customer could mess up their data and avoid that from happening in the first place.
[00:16:48] KG: Yeah. Preventative measures in this case.
Yes.
[00:16:51] Dan DeLong: Yeah. Nice way to put it. And
[00:16:54] KG: keep in mind that also because. At the end of the day, these are two softwares talking to each other, and in the [00:17:00] desktop situation, it's three, because we need that middle person to click to QuickBooks desktop. There is still the option to manually send it to QuickBooks if for whatever reason it's not syncing.
So you close your register, you go over to QuickBooks, it should be there. Almost immediately. Give it a quick refresh. It's not there. You can actually just go to your registered closures. It'll show you all of them with a nice little QB button next to it that says if it's green, you're good. If it's red, it hasn't done its sync yet.
So you just click on it and sync it through. But in most cases it's automatic. [00:17:30] There shouldn't be any issues. Barring any updates from any one of the softwares,
[00:17:33] Dan DeLong: Exactly. Now, one of the things that that I really appreciated about the financial exchange with QuickBooks, point of sale was its flexibility and you basically had three.
Options when it came to how these transactions are going to go from QuickBooks desktop to QuickBooks financial, right? We'll just call it financial is the, or QuickBooks point of sale desktop to QuickBooks financial. And that [00:18:00] was. Detail every transaction that was sold in your point of sale would come over looking like it was created inside of QuickBooks.
So the customer, the items that were sold on it, it didn't use inventory because the inventory was overtaken by point of sale. It uses dumb, it created dummy items that would represent the deep, the product detail, but not necessarily decrement. Your quantity on hand. So you've got the [00:18:30] detail.
You've got the daily sales summary, which would basically be the type of Things that I sold and you could choose to do that by department. You could do that just by taxable, non taxable. And then what it would do is it would put the payment items. So your cash check gift cards that were redeemed on account payments, those types of things would then be at the bottom.
So you basically have this daily sales with, the breakdown of your payment methods, [00:19:00] 0 would actually be. The total of that, but then you'd be able to, pass the baton to QuickBooks to say, Hey, okay, I'm going to go to the bank. So let's mirror what we did in reality. We took our checks and cash the.
Payment processor is going to be depositing, the funds. So let's make that deposit and those types of things. And then you had this in between where you could choose detail only for on account transactions. So if you [00:19:30] sold something to a customer in, out of your point of sale system, then, that they didn't pay for, but you're going to bill them later.
You could send over the detail to QuickBooks so just those types of transactions would have the detail and then everything else would be a daily sales summary to counter sales, right? So that way you could use, you weren't minimizing what you could do inside of QuickBooks where it comes with.
You could email them an invoice. They could pay online. And then. [00:20:00] QuickBooks could then make that automatic deposit for you. So that allowed you to utilize that. How do the transactions come over in QuickBooks? I'm sorry, and I keep getting it wrong. In Lightspeed over to QuickBooks.
[00:20:15] KG: So like I mentioned earlier, they are going to be separated depending on which field you attach them to. So the sales, discounts, on account balances, they're going to be lumped together depending on the categories that you choose within that integration. So in short very similar to [00:20:30] the way it is now.
Keep it straightforward, so that way there's some parity on how you're
[00:20:35] Dan DeLong: using the platform. So really it's more focused on the on the daily sales summary piece of that. Because with your on account sales, they're not, those transactions aren't going to come over to QuickBooks. In the detail you're still going to be managing all that inside of Lightspeed.
One thing I do want to point out though, is that you're going to get one of those transactions for each [00:21:00] register, right? The way that the way that Lightspeed does it is it does it by register, right? If you've got online sales for e commerce, That is a register to the light speed.
So you'll be able to segregate or see differently different transactions for each of those registers. So you'll be able to run reports on a on a customer basis because those registers are created as customers [00:21:30] inside of your QuickBooks. So you'll be able to segregate those transactions out and run get a little bit more useful reports inside QuickBooks because those transactions are coming over individually and segregated by register as opposed to just making one big lump sum at the end of the day.
[00:21:46] KG: Exactly. And those two, those who come to us with an e commerce platform, we always recommend an extra register to connect to your e commerce name that register e commerce or whatever it may be. And then that way of course, it's open 24 7. [00:22:00] Most businesses want to have it so that he can receive a sale anytime.
So if you open and close the register, it's more like a quick. close and open right away.
[00:22:07] Dan DeLong: So that way there's no cash to leave in the cash drawer because there is no change given. Exactly. So
[00:22:13] KG: you see everything accounted for. And then when you go over to QuickBooks, it'll show you, let's say main location.
Main register, but then it'll also show you main location online. So that way it'll show you, okay, which one is which what's sold where, again, it'll track things like gift cards, discounts, if [00:22:30] any.
[00:22:31] Dan DeLong: Now, another another neat function that came in with With the integrated payments inside of a QuickBooks point of sale, which of course is no longer the case is the reality of the batching of transactions to what really goes into the bank account, right?
So I want to talk a little bit about how this looks with Lightspeed and Lightspeed payments because what would happen in. In QuickBooks is they're going to ring up sales throughout the day. The [00:23:00] merchant service is going to, in, in traditional I've got a terminal, right?
That's another part of your end of day process is closing out your credit card transactions at the end of the day to batch all of the transactions that you've taken over the course of the day so that they, those get sent. to the bank, right? You didn't have to do any of that with QuickBooks point of sale because at 2 PM or 3 PM Pacific time, it [00:23:30] would batch everything for you.
Anything that happened during that time period. So the East coast folks were pretty well taken care of, but the West coast, they had this, Hey, wait a minute Three o'clock happened and I'm still open. So I'm taking the transaction at 3 30 PM. And that's actually showing up the next day, right?
Point of sale created this reconciliation process that was automatically, so that batch ID, which is basically a number that was associated with the merchant account would be fed [00:24:00] back to to QuickBooks or point of sale and passed along to QuickBooks during the. During the end of day, so that when you go to the bank register or, go to make a deposit inside of QuickBooks, then it would actually split those out by batch to make it a lot easier to reconcile the reality of what's been deposited by what what actually happened throughout that day, because if you're just doing it based off of the transaction date you're out of luck [00:24:30] because even though you did all those transactions that day, the reality is some of those went to the next day.
How does that work with Lightspeed and Lightspeed Payments with regards to the reality of what happens with the funds transfer?
[00:24:48] KG: So I'm not exactly sure what the times that I'll have to double check with
[00:24:53] Dan DeLong: but yeah,
[00:24:56] KG: that was, oh, you got me dead, but but I do know that it is [00:25:00] calculated at the moment of transaction.
So every transaction. And then we send out next business day with our fee deducted already.
[00:25:09] Dan DeLong: And of course there is a report that shows that it's a net, it's a net deposit, okay.
[00:25:14] KG: Correct. Net deposit of whatever it may be minus our fee. And then it is bashed out daily. That I will find out
[00:25:24] Dan DeLong: quickly.
We'll double check and figure that out. Provide that as information.[00:25:30] The question I guess I have, now, what would happen?
[00:25:33] KG: Go ahead. Sorry, before I move on, so it's the what time is like the cutoff for transactions?
[00:25:39] Dan DeLong: Yeah, gotcha. And then Depending on the card type that they're taking, Visa MasterCard typically would get lumped together and then, American Express being the independent financial institution that it thinks it is, would be deposited.
Differently as well as discover [00:26:00] and you could also take JCB cards inside of a QuickBooks point of sale. But how does that work with different cards like that with Lightspeed payments? Do they all get lumped together in the deposit minus the fees or is it is it separate?
[00:26:17] KG: No, the good thing is that we make it very simple.
One fee for all cards. So every single card doesn't matter. So that way you don't have to think about it. Customer comes in and you're not stopping them from transacting just because they're different cards that they're using. So I [00:26:30] max discovery. MasterCard doesn't matter. They're all the same. We'll deduct the fee per transaction and then lump it together for next day.
And I did find an article that outlines the times. So for example, in the U S it is. It says 3 a. m. Eastern, so in this case, 12 p. m. Same
[00:26:47] Dan DeLong: thing as in Canada. Oh, it should be everybody's end of day. Exactly.
[00:26:51] KG: Yeah. Ours is the end of, let's say, the actual day time frame. So it takes one business day, we cut it [00:27:00] off, and then we batch out.
And pay it next
[00:27:01] Dan DeLong: business day. Got it. So I'll, and that's interesting. Cause sometimes people don't take American Express, that used to be the thing. It was like, Oh, I'm not going to take American Express because their fees are higher. Yeah. That's not the case with Lightspeed Payments.
It doesn't matter if it's a Visa, MasterCard, if they've got a 4 percent cash back that they're giving. You know that the cardholder is issuing which is more than your fee, right? Exactly. And then the discount [00:27:30] fee. So sometimes they'll be underwater, but then, but you don't pull that back from the retailer though, right?
[00:27:35] KG: Correct. And as an Amex user myself it happens all the time. I'll go into a small business owner. And they'll turn away my MasterCard. I'm like, I don't have any other card with me. So transaction is void now. But in this case correct. Any card, doesn't matter. You no longer have to ask them. Just pay cash or card.
They tap, swipe their card, in and out. Customer leaves. They're happy.
[00:27:58] Dan DeLong: And they're, yeah, that's it.[00:28:00] One thing I, we debit cards, how does that can you take debit cards in Lightspeed payments and it's a fee differently because it was for QuickBooks.
[00:28:09] KG: Yeah, I believe the fee is only different in Canada.
Whereas it's only that cents, like the 2. 6 plus 10 cents, for example. It would only be the 10 cents in Canada, but in the U S I believe it's the same for all cards. Okay.
[00:28:24] Dan DeLong: So they're essentially treated as credit card transactions. Correct. Because there, [00:28:30] there was a different fee structure for debit card, which is typically why people would ask, does this be debit or credit?
Because the fees were less. Yeah, when you're processing it with as a debit card but even if they Process it as a debit. They'll still get the option to put in. Their pin through the transaction terminal,
[00:28:52] KG: correct? Yes They have the option to insert chip put in their pin swipe tap google pay [00:29:00] android pay
[00:29:02] Dan DeLong: All right, I think that I Puts an end to our day of of this end of day discussion with with light speed versus quickbooks point of sale kg.
I really appreciate you joining us and making yourself available and showing your lovely apartment There in the background which last week had some people Walking in it, somebody walked behind you. I think in the virtual background of grayed out, but [00:29:30] any closing thoughts that you have on this series that we've had?
[00:29:33] KG: Just to be confident in our ability here again, with any QuickBooks users, again, we've had a lot of experience now since the sunset. We're very confident. We have a team that's pretty much dedicated to just people that are transitioning from QuickBooks. And we've made it very simple. So give us a shot, check us out and let us prove to you why we're a good fit.
[00:29:52] Dan DeLong: So it's they felt the pain and understand that. And that, that's what I think I like the most about Lightspeed is that, they're an [00:30:00] all in one, potentially an all in one solution, whether it's retail e commerce, and then they have. Segues into their open API for those tougher situations that might be necessary.
So we appreciate you all joining us next week. We're going to pick back up. I think actually Carrie's going to be with us, which would be nice. And and we're going to be talking about the customer deposits. In QuickBooks [00:30:30] 2024. Join us for that. And we appreciate you joining us today on the workshop Wednesday and have a great day.
