The best back-office platform to use alongside Lightspeed

Your POS system is not the same thing as your back office. The two are often conflated, and the confusion is understandable: the till is where the money comes in, so it feels like the financial hub of the business. But the POS records what was sold. The back office tells you what it cost to produce, what margin you made, and whether the numbers add up.

Those are different questions. They need different tools. And in hospitality, the gap between them is where most operators lose visibility.

What the POS does, and what it does not do

A good POS system does exactly what it says: it manages your point of sale. It handles table management, orders, split bills, payment types, covers, modifiers. It produces a sales summary at the close of service. In a well-run venue, that summary is clean, detailed, and reliable.

Lightspeed does this exceptionally well. For a full picture of what Lightspeed provides and where the back-office gap begins, it is worth reading alongside this article. It is designed for hospitality operations, built with the complexity of real service in mind, and trusted by a significant number of serious operators. The sales data it produces is accurate and structured, which makes it genuinely useful as an input into other systems.

But a POS is a front-of-house tool. It does not know what you paid for the ingredients in the dish you just sold. It does not track what is left on the shelf after service. It cannot tell you whether the portion sizes coming out of the kitchen this week match your recipe costs. It does not reconcile your supplier invoices against your deliveries, run your end-of-day cash-up, or give you a consolidated GP picture across three sites.

That is not a criticism of Lightspeed. It is a description of what a POS is. The back office is a different layer of the business.

What "back office" actually means in hospitality

The term is used loosely, so it is worth being precise.

Back-office operations in hospitality sit broadly across four areas:

Inventory and stock control. Knowing what you have, what you are using, and what is going missing. This includes stock takes, delivery checking, waste recording, and the movement of goods between departments or sites. A POS can tell you what was sold. Stock control tells you whether what was sold matches what left the shelf.

Gross profit tracking. Your GP% is the percentage of revenue remaining after the cost of goods sold. It is the number your business runs on, and the one most closely linked to operational decisions: which dishes to push, where to apply price increases, how to set par levels for ordering. Calculating it accurately requires both your sales data (from the POS) and your purchasing costs (from your invoices and stock position). Neither source alone is enough.

Invoice processing and supplier management. Every delivery comes with an invoice. Processing that invoice accurately, getting the right cost to the right product in the right cost centre, is the step that makes GP visible. When invoice processing is slow, inaccurate, or disconnected from stock, the financial picture becomes unreliable. The numbers may look clean, but they are not grounded in what actually happened.

Finance and cash-up reconciliation. The end-of-day cash-up reconciles what the POS recorded against what physically landed in the till, and feeds a daily financial picture. Done well, it is the daily pulse of the operation. Done badly, or done manually from memory the next morning, it produces noise rather than signal.

These four areas form a connected picture. Sales feed into GP. Purchases feed into GP. Stock levels validate both. Cash-up ties the daily numbers together. None of them work properly in isolation, and a POS is not designed to cover any of them in depth.

The practical gap

Most operators running Lightspeed know what their sales figures look like. What they are less certain about is whether those sales were actually profitable.

The margin question sits in the back office. You need to know what you paid per unit, whether the delivery matched the order, how your actual consumption compares to what the recipes say it should be, and whether your GP by category is tracking where it should. That requires a layer of tooling that is separate from, but connected to, your POS.

The connection is the key word. Without it, operators find themselves doing something they should never have to do: re-entering data. Taking the sales figures from Lightspeed, typing them into a spreadsheet or another system, and trying to build a picture that way. Manual re-entry introduces error, loses context, and takes time that could be spent on the operation. It also ensures the financial picture is always lagging, never live.

What changes when Lightspeed connects to Hops

When Lightspeed is integrated with Hops, sales data flows automatically. No re-entry. No export-and-import. No daily data entry task.

That automatic sync changes what becomes possible. Sales figures land directly into the cash-up workflow, so the end-of-day process becomes a review rather than a reconstruction. The manager is checking what the system already knows, adding context where needed, and moving on in minutes rather than an hour.

The same sales data feeds into variance analysis. Hops compares what the POS says was sold against the theoretical consumption from your recipes, and checks that against your actual stock movement. This is exactly the gap that Lightspeed's built-in inventory module does not address. If spirits are tracking short, or food cost is running above expected, you see it in the numbers before it becomes a month-end problem.

The gap Hops fills, alongside Lightspeed, covers the full back-office picture:

• Stock takes run on mobile, reviewed immediately, with variance explained at the point of count rather than days later
• GP by category visible week on week, grounded in real purchasing data rather than estimates
• Supplier ordering based on par levels and actual consumption, not gut feel
• Invoice processing with real OCR extraction, reviewed by your team before anything posts to accounts
• Cash-up reconciliation pulling Lightspeed sales automatically, with petty cash and variance notes captured in the moment
• Multi-site consolidation giving group operators a single view across locations without manual aggregation

None of these replace what Lightspeed does. They extend what becomes visible once the sales data is in the room.

Where one system ends and the other begins

The line is fairly clear in practice. Lightspeed manages the front-of-house: service, tables, orders, payments. Hops manages the back office: what things cost, what margin was made, whether stock and invoices and cash all add up correctly. The integration between them means neither side is working from incomplete information.

Robbie Francis, who co-founded Hops, has a long history with Lightspeed, having played a central role in bringing the system to the UK market during its earlier years as iKentoo. The Hops integration is not a workaround or an afterthought. It is a deliberate connection between two systems designed to cover complementary parts of a hospitality operation.

The result for operators is a cleaner, more complete picture of the business: Lightspeed's sales data joined to Hops' back-office layer, with no manual work in between and no guessing about what the numbers mean.

If you are running Lightspeed and want to understand what your margin actually looks like, Hops connects directly.