Lightspeed Duplicate Receitp
Lightspeed retail (formally Vend), has a known issue with duplicate receipt numbers being issued. I first noticed the issue with a customer back in December 2021. Lightspeed support know about the issue, but it appears to be a ‘hard computer science’ problem to solve and the “issue has turned out to be quite complex”.
The initial problem appeared when a customer returned a product that happened to have a duplicate receipt number - in fact it was shared with 17 other customers receipts.
If you do return for a customer who shares are receipt number with someone else then all the transactions amounts will be returned to the current transaction, with a negative amount to pay, and no products.
The other thing that happens when you do a return on with a receipt with a duplicate number is all the products from all the sles will be returned back to the store, with a database transaction record of “Sale (Adjustment)” in my case 18 sales and no idea of what the products were. There is no way of running a report of sale adjustments, a stock take was the only suggestion from support. After 2 years on back and forth with support they can offer no solutions to find out what stock is returned by the ‘system’.
Some of the thoughts from support as to why it happens was to suggest multiple tills using the same register, however, in this customers case it was only the single PC. Then there was a suggestion of a network connectivity issue - I would assume the system was designed to handle small connection issues, however, the client has a 100MB fibre connection which we ran a ping against AWS North California which I believe is where our Lightspeed connection is hosted, and got roughly 150-160ms pings over the week - a very solid connection.
The only way to clear the negative till transaction is to go to Sell | Status and click “reset data”
Lightspeed Reset Data.
This will take 5-10 minutes to reload the register, however, is the only way to bring up a functioning sell screen. It pays to check if you have duplicate invoices. This can be done either by an export and ‘find duplicates’ in Excel, or looking through your sales. If you have then reset data when you have no customers as this seems to at least temporarily fix the issue.
The last update from Lightspeed support was in October 2022….
“Correcting this means we need to overhaul our sales processes, which are a fundamental part of the program and need to redesigned carefully. When this work is done, we'll have more layers of validation to prevent duplicate invoice numbers, which should also prevent missing invoice numbers. I do understand your frustration, and we're working hard to prevent these errors from happening again.”