Initial Questionnaire

Overview

Some basic concepts to note while working through the Lightspeed process:

In general, it’s a good idea to work through the modules on the home page, from left to right, top to bottom.
Within a module, work through the steps from top to bottom. The ‼️ symbol indicates that the step is compulsory, and that it must be done before subsequent steps can be handled.
You can redo steps as many times as required, and return to prior steps at any point in the process.
Try to tick off each step that applies to your business, and resolve data quality issues before you go live with Business Central.
Make use of the Go-Live Readiness assessment to sign off the critical steps of the process, and to hold your team accountable for your preparation process.

The Lightspeed Questionnaire is your starting point for configuring Business Central. This helps you define your business requirements and automatically configures the system based on your responses. From the Lightspeed home page, click on ‘Answer initial questionnaire’.

Financial Setup

These settings will be used during the configuration of the Finance module of Business Central.

What month does your financial year end?: from the dropdown, select the month in which your financial year ends.

How many financial years would you like to create?: This will default to 3, but can be amended to any number of 3 or greater. The system will create financial periods for the prior year, current year nd one or more years into the future.

How many bank accounts do you operate?: Enter the number of bank accounts which your business operates.

Inventory and Warehousing Setup

This section determines your inventory management approach:

Do you buy and sell inventory? If the business trades with stock, turn the switch on. This will make the inventory setups available on the home screen.

How many inventory warehouses do you operate? Enter the number of separate physical locations where you need to manage your inventory.

Do you want to use Advanced Warehousing” Activates the setups for advanced warehousing, which includes

Over-receiving Threshold This setting allows you to over-receive goods. For example, if you order a quantity of 500 units of a product, and you have an over-delivery percent of 10, you will be allowed to receive up to 550 units on the order, without modifying the order quantity.

Advanced Modules

Use this section to switch on access to configure advanced modules in Business Central.

Validation Templates

To assist in managing the quality of data which will be imported, a set of validation templates are provided. These can be amended, or new templates created, based on the data rules that apply to the business.

Using Data Import Templates

Data templates are used to map Excel data to Business Central tables. When the Lightspeed extension is installed, a number of default data templates are automatically loaded, one template per module. Each table in these templates is configured with the commonly used or essential columns required for the table. The templates can be edited, to remove or add columns as needed.The template is also used to configure basic data validation and quality checks. Additional templates can be added for loading adhoc tables that are not catered for in the standard Lightspeed configuration. The configuration page for each module provides access to the module-specific template. All templates are accessible from the Lightspeed home page, by clicking on ‘Edit Templates’:

From the list, select a template, and click on Edit:

In the example below (the Sales template), the panel of the left contains the tables configured for the template. The panel on the right contains the list of fields in the selected table (Salesperson):

The field list contains all fields contained in the table. A field can be selected / deselected by tick on the column ‘Copy Field’. Scroll to the right of the field list, until you see the column ‘Excel Sequence No.’. This controls the sequence in which columns are created on the import template. In this example, the salesperson code will be in column A of the spreadsheet, the name will be in Column B and so forth.

Scroll further to the right, until you see the column’Validation Template Code’.

The Email field, subject to the EMAIL template, will be stripped of all special characters, excel ‘-‘, ‘_’ and ‘@’.

These validation templates can be modidfied to adjust the characters that are removed from incoming data.

Scroll again, until the fields Minimum and Maximum become visible.

For text fields, these values can be used to manage the length of a field. For numeric fields, they control the minimum allowable value, and the maximum allowable value. In this example, the fields ‘Code’ and ‘Name’ have a mimimum length of 1. This will cause the system to report a data quality issue with records where these fields are blank. The field ‘Commission %’ must contain a value between 0 and 100. Since 100% may be an unrealistic commssion rate, you may choose to set it to the value appropriate in your business.