The Supplier List allows you to organize inventory items by the vendors who provided them. Learn how to use suppliers in Lightspeed Retail, visit the Supplier List to add, rename, and delete suppliers, and assign suppliers to items in BackOffice or at the register.
Table of Contents
Understanding Suppliers in Lightspeed Retail
To understand how suppliers in Lightspeed Retail impact inventory management, let’s define what they are, look at some examples, and review how they are used.
Suppliers are the vendors from whom the business gets its items.
Examples of items and their suppliers:
Item
Supplier
Bottled Water
Grocery Supply Co.
T-Shirt
USA Shirts
Sheet Set
Bedding and More
Assign suppliers to inventory items to:
Quickly filter the Item List for items from a particular supplier.
See which specific suppliers’ products generate the most sales for a single location or across all linked locations using the Sales by Supplier report.
View a list of existing suppliers, add new suppliers, edit supplier names, and delete suppliers all from one BackOffice page.
For businesses with multiple linked locations, the same set of suppliers is used for each linked Lightspeed Retail store. The Supplier List for each linked location is identical, and adding, renaming, or deleting a supplier in one location will automatically make that change in all other locations. Item assignments must be managed separately for items in each location.
In BackOffice, click ‘Items’, then ‘Supplier List’.
Click to Enlarge
Enter the updated supplier name and click ‘Continue’.
If you have multiple linked locations, the supplier will be updated in all linked locations automatically. Renaming a supplier will also update its name in historical reporting. To learn more, visit the article for a specific report from our BackOffice support page.
Note: If a supplier has items assigned to it, deleting it will automatically unassign the items. Follow the steps here to assign the items to a new supplier.
Assign items to suppliers from BackOffice or the Retail POS (S-Series) app (employees with BackOffice permissions only) to organize the business’s inventory by vendor. For large inventories (50+ items), we recommend using Bulk Management to create or modify items.
To learn how to assign items to departments and categories, visit our Organize Inventory article.
For businesses with multiple linked locations, item assignments must be managed separately for items in each linked location.
Visit the Item List in BackOffice or from the Retail POS (S-Series) app (employees with BackOffice permissions only.
In BackOffice, click ‘Items’ and select ‘Item List’.
In the Retail POS (S-Series) app for iOS, tap ‘Manage Items’ on the Main Menu. For the Retail POS (S-Series) app for Android, tap ‘Setup’ on the register menu, then select ‘Manage Items’.
Choose a ‘Supplier’ or select ‘Add a new supplier’ from the drop-down to create a new one.
Changing the supplier assigned to an item will also update this information in historical reporting. To learn more, visit the article for a specific report from our BackOffice support page.
