Connect Lightyear to IdealPOS

Idealpos / Jensen



Idealpos offer many modules and features to help you with the day-to-day operations of your business, such as Restaurant, Room Reservations, Gaming, Loyalty, Bar Tabs and many more. For more information about their wide range of solutions, please contact the helpful team at Idealpos

The below information will assist you in configuring Lightyear to export your inventory to Idealpos. 


Please note that only Idealpos version 4 and above has the import facility. If you are unsure of which version you are running, please contact Idealpos using the above link. 


Setup in Lightyear

First, you need to switch on the Inventory export feature, to learn how to do so, click here. Once activated, head to Settings > Inventory Settings  and select Idealpos from the software dropdown.



You'll need to start importing your suppliers from Idealpos, but first let's talk units...

Default Product Unit

Once you have selected Idealpos as your Inventory/POS Software in Lightyear, we want to set the default product units. To do so, select "Edit" as shown below.


If the majority of your suppliers invoice in cases/cartons, then choose this option. Otherwise select Units (which will always default your items to a Product Unit of 1).

Don't worry too much if you aren't sure what is best for you, by design, this can be changed at any time as different suppliers invoice stock in different ways. Let's define a case, and a unit:

Unit – Item that is sold as that item whole (e.g. 1 Duff beer bottle = 1 Unit) 
Case – Item that is made up of multiple units (e.g. A case of 24 Duff beers = Case of 24)

If in doubt, recommend setting to 'units' to start, you can always change this as needed.

Mandatory Export Fields

By default, Lightyear will prevent you from exporting if your bills are missing a Case Qty  or Unit Type, but this can be changed!

In Inventory Settings, click into the Inventory/POS Settings option. 

Here you can mix and match the Mandatory Export Fields between these options:
  1. Case Qty
  2. Unit Type
  3. POS Code

Click confirm.

Any bills added to inventory from this point will check that the mandatory fields are met.

These will be flagged in Panel 1 with a warning icon . Panel 2 will highlight the fields with mandatory data missing, and users won't be able to export without adding in the missing information.

Once you have made the necessary adjustments, click Save and you will then be able to export.

Inventory/POS Supplier Cards

Idealpos does not require you to include the details of the supplier within the file that we create for you to import into Idealpos, but by identifying the supplier as Idealpos knows it to be, we can name the export file for you in a manner which will make it easy for you to identify which Supplier the file relates to.

We will name each of your files for import as follows:

280612Fosters_Australia_Ltd.inv

where the first 6 numbers are the delivery date DDMMYY and the next string is the name of the supplier as Idealpos knows it to be.  The “.inv” is the file type.
Because it makes your import routine a lot easier, we make this a mandatory step.

Assigning the Idealpos Supplier Cards to the Lightyear Supplier

After you have added/imported the Idealpos Supplier Names into Lightyear, you need to go to Suppliers, select a supplier and click Edit. From there, choose a value from the Supplier Card (Idealpos) drop-list for each supplier in Lightyear whose deliveries you might want to send to Idealpos.

In the example below, the company in Lightyear is called COCA-COLA AMATIL (AUST) PYL LTD, but Idealpos knows it to be “CCA”





What we now have is a link/connection between what you have called the supplier in Lightyear, and what Idealpos knows the supplier to be.

Importing into Idealpos from Lightyear

Once you click Export from the inventory tab in Lightyear, Lightyear will produce a ZIP file. (Depending on whether there was 1 invoice or multiple invoices being exported, will depend on whether there is 1 or more files contained in the Zip file). It is done in Zip format because Idealpos require a file for each invoice, so for you to be able to export many invoices from Lightyear at once, it needs to export them together in Zip format.

Idealpos require an .inv file for import, so the Zip file will first need to be extracted before you can import it into Idealpos. The extracted files should be saved in the folder on your computer that Idealpos helped you create.

These files are in the same format as ILG import files.  So in order to import these into Idealpos you need to import them as though they were ILG.inv files, but instead of identifying your supplier as ILG, you should obviously identify the correct supplier.

Please refer to your Idealpos manual or reseller for more information on importing an ILG.inv file into Idealpos. The User guide can be found here

To learn how to add products into Inventory within Lightyear please view this article: Inventory Tab



      

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