Everything you need to know about Benson’s integration with point-of-sale system Lightspeed (formerly know as iKentoo).
Setting up Lightspeed
To get started on integrating your Lightspeed account of Benson, make sure you have the following information:
- Your username and email address for Lightspeed
- Your Business Location ID from Lightspeed that will be linked to your property on Benson.
- A list of Payment Methods from Lightspeed that will determine which bills are sent into Benson.
Once you’ve got these important details on-hand, head over to the “Integrations” section in Benson and open up the Lightspeed card.
You’ll immediately see the four essential fields that you need to capture up-front: your username and password, your Business Location ID and the Period Start Day. The Period Start Day will determine from what date Benson will start fetching bills from Lightspeed. Capture these fields with the information you have and then head over to the “Company Map” section.
Benson splits a Lightspeed bill into three specific parts: the payment part, the gratuity part (if applicable) and the actual charge part for all items on the bill. Therefore, you’ll need to map your Benson Payment Types to the payment methods you’ve set up on your Lightspeed bill as well as your Benson Charge Types to the charge types you’ve got on Lightspeed.
For example, if your Lightspeed system accepts credit card payments, then you’ll be mapping the “credit card” payment method from Lightspeed to the “Credit Card” Payment Type you would have created on Benson.
However, your first requirement will be to specify which Charge Type on Benson you’d like your Lightspeed bills to automatically fall into. Since Benson accepts all charges on the bill as a single, totalled item, you may map, for example, a “Restaurant” Charge Type from Benson as your Default Charge Type.
When it comes to any Gratuity amounts on the Lightspeed bill, these will be pulled out by Benson and slotted into their own Charge Type. For example, you may want all gratuity amounts on the Lightspeed bill to go to a “Restaurant Gratuity” Charge Type on Benson. You can select which Charge Types these should go to by using the “Gratuity Charge Type” drop-down list.
Since your restaurant customers may be able to pay their bills in multiple ways, you’ll be able to capture and map as many Payment Types as you like between Lightspeed and Benson.
You’ll use the “Their Field” drop-down to select Payment Type and then use the “Select Value” drop-down list to capture the relevant Payment Type from Benson. Lightspeed will have a code or name to represent this payment type, and this gets captured in the “Map Value” field.
Lastly, while you are able to send all charges from an Lightspeed bill as a single, lump sum to one of Benson’s Charge Types, you can map more if you would like to split things up a bit. For example, you can split your Lightspeed bill charges into “Food” and “Beverage” by creating these two Charge Types on Benson and then mapping them to their relevant partner in Lightspeed. While this isn’t necessary, the option is available.
Once you’ve got all of this set up out the way, you’re ready to go and activate the integration between Benson and Lightspeed.
Assigning Bills from Lightspeed to Benson
With the integration setup and activated, you’ll find an Lightspeed icon on the Front Desk section of the system. By clicking on this card, you’ll get a view of all bills coming in from Lightspeed into Benson. You can assign bills here to invoices.
Payment Methods and Filtering Bills
You may not want every single bill from Lightspeed to be pulled into Benson, so Benson will only pull in bills that have certain Payment Methods mapped to Benson.
For example, let’s say you have a bill from Lightspeed that you’d like to have assigned to a Room in a Reservation on Benson. The Payment Method used in Lightspeed on this bill is called “BENSON”. On Benson’s side, you will have listed “BENSON” as an accepted Payment Method from Lightspeed. This bill will be pulled through and assigned.
It’s important to keep in mind that Benson will only fetch bills that have a particular Payment Method listed in the Lightspeed setup. These Payment Methods are captured in the Lightspeed setup of Benson in the box titled “Payment Methods”. You can capture more than one by separating each with a semi-colon. Remember to make sure that the Payment Methods listed in Benson have the exact spelling as spacing as they do on Lightspeed.