Insights Live allows you to stay connected to your business at all times even when you're away from the venue. Designed for mobility, it offers real-time sales data and alerts for events like deleted orders or reconciliation variances, helping you stay informed wherever you are. 

This guide will walk you through setting up and accessing Insights Live, as well as understanding key performance metrics and making the most of its features. 

What's in this guide?

What you'll need
Downloading the Insights Live app
Viewing the Dashboard
Analyzing Trends
Monitoring Alerts

What you'll need

• Insights enabled in your account with a Lite plan or higher. 
• At least the View Insights permission enabled in Back Office. 
• A mobile device running on at least Android 8 or iOS 11. 

Insights Lite plan offers limited alerts and features. To fully maximize all features, upgrade to the Insights View plan or higher. Navigate to the Subscriptions section in your Back Office to check your plan.

Downloading the Lightspeed Insights Live app 

Viewing the Dashboard

The Dashboard Overview provides a snapshot of key metrics such as your revenue, guest count, profit, reporting groups, and order types across daily, weekly, and monthly views. It helps you quickly monitor performance and easily explore more detailed insights. 

Revenue

This section shows the following:

• Revenue: The total value of all sales within the selected time range, including both paid orders and open orders. 
• Open orders: Orders that have been created but not yet paid or finalized on the POS. 
• Paid orders: Orders that have been completed and fully paid. 
• Average Transaction: Revenue divided by the total number of orders (paid + open) within the specified time range. 
• Revenue trend graph: Shows projected revenue for the day, week, or month based on historical sales data. 
  

Tap anywhere on the graph to view more insights by hour of the day, day of the week, or day of the month, and see how each compares to the average.

Guests

This section shows the guest count and average spend per person for the selected time range, compared to your benchmark. The data is sourced from the Guest Tracking add-on. To enable it, see our Guest Count tracking add-on guide. 

Profit

This shows the revenue minus the Cost of Goods (COGS) within the chosen time range, compared to your benchmark. 

Lightspeed Restaurant automatically calculates your Cost of Goods. For more details, check out our guide on calculating your cost of goods.

Reporting Groups

This shows the total sales ($) for each Reporting Group, including both paid and open orders, within the selected time range. 

Tap on a Reporting Group to see the top 10 Products.

Reporting Groups help provide an accurate sales breakdown in your reports. To learn more, check out our guide on setting up Reporting Groups for your venue.

Order Types

This shows the total sales, including paid and open orders, for each Order Type (Dine-in, Takeaway, Catering, etc.) within the selected time range. This data is collected using the Order Types add-on. Check out the Order Types setup guide for details.

Analyzing Trends

Trends gives you a clear weekly or monthly view of key metrics, helping you quickly identify what’s driving your business and respond effectively.

Measures

This section displays the metrics you can select to compare their trends against the average. You can also select more than one measure to see how their trends relate to each other.

Monthly and Weekly Trend

View selected measures over the past 3 full months or 6 complete weeks. Tap on any month or week to see how its data compares to the overall trend, including totals and percentage differences. 

Monitoring Alerts

This section displays alerts for Reconciliations, variances, end-of-day reports, and deleted orders. This helps you stay informed about critical events that may affect your sales figures and reporting accuracy. 

Reconciliations

This notifies you when a takings reconciliation is completed and displays the variance amount.

Tap to see details on:

• Recorded and counted totals
• Takings completion time
• Site location
• Register Name
• Staff member

Deleted orders

Provide real-time alerts when an order has been deleted, helping you monitor unusual activity and maintain accurate records.

End of Day reports

These alerts are sent after your venue closes based on your trading hours. It provides a snapshot of the day’s figures in the same layout as the Dashboard, along with reconciliation data.

You can also access these reports by tapping More in the lower right corner, then selecting End of Day Reports. You can select Today or Yesterday view to easily compare the venue's current performance with the previous day, without needing to log into Insights Web.

What's next?