Managing your wastage is essential for maintaining accurate inventory and controlling costs. You can track losses from spoilage, staff errors, or refunded items to help identify opportunities to improve your operations.

Every submitted wastage quantity is automatically deducted from your current stock count to keep your inventory accurate. 

What’s in this guide?

Enabling wastage
Recording wastage
Accessing the wastage report
Frequently asked questions

Enabling wastage

Before you can submit a wastage entry, you must enable the Wastage feature. Once enabled, users can enter a wastage entry directly in Back Office or from the POS. 

To enable Wastage:

1. Log in to Back Office with your Lightspeed credentials.
2. Search for and select Wastage. 
3. Click Enable.
   

Recording wastage

All items can be recorded as wastage, including your recipe ingredients or products you're selling from the POS. When logging a wastage entry, you can select from the available predefined wastage reasons to ensure accurate reporting of your stock loss. 

Recording wastage from the Back Office

Wastage entries can be submitted from the Back Office by users with either Admin or Back of House permissions enabled.

To record wastage from the Back Office:

1. From the navigation menu, select My site > Wastage.
2. Click Record Wastage. 
   
3. In the Wastage entry screen, fill out the following:
   • Date: The date when the wastage occurred.
   • Product: The item or ingredient that was wasted. 
   • Reason: The cause of the wastage, such as refunded, expired, stock damaged, etc.. 
   • Quantity: The amount of the product that was wasted. For ingredients, use the same unit that is set in the recipe builder and enter partial amounts in decimals. For example, 0.25 kg of flour, 0.5L of milk, or 1 whole bread loaf. 
4. Under Options, click + to add the wastage entry.
5. Click Save Wastage. 
   

Recording wastage from the POS

Staff who don't have access to Back Office can record wastage entries directly from the POS. This can be done by users with the Front of house or the wastage permissions enabled. 

To record wastage from the POS:

1. On the POS, click ☰ (Menu).
   
2. Select Add-ons > Wastage.
3. Fill out the following details:
   • Product: The item or ingredient that was wasted.
   • Reason: The cause of the wastage, such as refunded, expired, stock damaged, etc.. 
   • Quantity: The amount of the product that was wasted. For ingredients, use the same unit set in the recipe builder and enter partial amounts in decimals. For example, 0.25 kg of flour, 0.5L of milk, or 1 whole bread loaf. 
4. Click Record Wastage.

Accessing the wastage report

Wastage can be tracked in the POS, in Back Office, or through Lightspeed Insights. This section guides you on how to access the wastage report from Back Office and the POS.

To access a detailed report of your wastage in Lightspeed Insights, you can access the wastage dashboard. This allows you to drill down into wastage data by date, staff, reason, reporting group, and more to identify trends and reduce your wastage costs. 

Wastage history in the POS

The wastage history is displayed in real time in the POS. You can review past entries and monitor stock losses as they occur. 

To access the wastage history in the POS:

1. On the POS, click ☰ (Menu).
2. Select Add-ons > Wastage.
3. Select Wastage History. Here, you can see the following:
   • Date: The date when the wastage entry was recorded.
   • User: The staff member who logged the wastage.
   • Product: The item or ingredient that was wasted. 
   • Reason: The cause of the wastage, such as refunded, expired, stock damaged, etc.. 
   • Quantity: The amount of the product that was wasted.
     

Wastage report in Back Office

You can also access a quick summary of your wastage items within a specified timeframe in Back Office. This gives you a clear overview of your stock losses at a glance. 

To access the wastage report in Back Office:

1. From the Back Office navigation menu, select Reports > Wastage.
2. (Optional) Use the advanced filter to search wastage results by site, wastage reason, or timeframe, then click Filter. Here, you can see the following:
   • Most Wasted: The product with the highest recorded wastage within your selected timeframe.
   • Quantity: The total number of units wasted for the most wasted product.
   • Total Cost: The total cost value of all the recorded wastage.
   • Lost Sales: The total revenue lost due to wasted items. This may be shown as tax-inclusive or tax-exclusive depending on your tax configuration settings.
   • Product: The item or ingredient that was recorded as wasted.
   • Reason: The cause of the wastage, such as refunded, expired, stock damaged, etc.
   • Qty: The amount of the product that was wasted.
   • Net Cost: The cost value of the wasted quantity based on the item's unit cost. 
   • Tax Amount: The tax portion attributed to the wasted item based on the applicable tax rate.
     

Frequently asked questions

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