Identify sales trends faster with Reporting Groups in Lightspeed Insights. These mutually exclusive groupings ensure that your product data is aggregated cleanly, providing a clear and organized product sales report. 

What’s in this guide?

Understanding Reporting Groups
Configuring Reporting Groups
Accessing sales data by Reporting Groups

Understanding Reporting Groups

Reporting Groups in Lightspeed Insights are a powerful way to organize and analyze your product sales. They are mutually exclusive, meaning each product can belong to only one Reporting Group. This structure ensures clean, non-overlapping data aggregation, giving you an accurate breakdown of your sales performance.

Reporting Groups vs. Categories vs. Tags

Reporting Groups, Categories, and Tags all help organize your products, but each serves a distinct purpose:

• Reporting Groups: Mutually exclusive, meaning each product can only belong to one group. This makes it ideal for accurate sales aggregation and reporting. 
• Categories: Not mutually exclusive because one product can be assigned to multiple categories. The Sales By Category report in Insights reflects how each category performs overall but does not offer a true breakdown of product sales. 
• Tags: Not mutually exclusive, which means a single product can have multiple tags. They are primarily for searchability and filtering in Back Office Reports. Tags are not used in Lightspeed Insights and are not designed for sales breakdowns.

Configuring Reporting Groups

Configuring Reporting Groups ensures your sales data is grouped correctly in Lightspeed Insights. This includes creating a Reporting Group name that aligns with your sales strategy and assigning it to the appropriate products. 

Adding a Reporting Group

When creating a Reporting Group, choose groupings that reflect how you want to analyze your sales data. For food and beverage businesses, Food, Drink, and Retail are typical choices. 

To add a Reporting Group:

1. Log in to Back Office with your Lightspeed credentials.
2. From the navigation menu, select Products > Reporting Groups. 
3. Click Add Reporting Group. 
4. Enter a name in the dialog box, then click Add Group. 
   

Assigning a Reporting Group

After creating your Reporting Groups, the next step is to assign them to individual products. This ensures your sales data is properly categorized in Insights. Note that products without a group assigned will appear under None in your Insights report. 

To assign a Reporting Group: 

1. From the navigation menu, select Products. 
2. Enter the reporting group for each product under the Reporting Group column. 

Accessing sales data by Reporting Group

A paid Lightspeed Insights subscription is required to access Reporting Group reports. Insights offers two types of built-in reports that break down sales by Reporting Group, helping you see how groups and individual products contribute to total revenue.  

Reporting Groups Overview

This report shows the percentage and ranking of your Reporting Groups based on revenue. 

To access the Reporting Groups Overview report: 

1. Navigate to Lightspeed Insights. 
2. From the navigation menu, select Premium Reports > Product Performance. 
3. Select Reporting Groups Overview. Here's a sample view of the report:

Individual Reporting Group Performance

This report shows the total revenue generated for a specific Reporting Group, along with a breakdown of products within that group. 

To access the Individual Reporting Group Performance report:

1. From the Reporting Groups Overview report, drill down into each reporting group by selecting it.
2. Select Individual Reporting Group Performance. 
   Here's a sample view of the report:

If you have the Insights Custom plan, you can include Reporting Groups as a dimension when building your own reports. Find them under Build From > Sales Details > Products > Dimensions.

What's next?