Advanced Insights is currently available to Lightspeed Restaurant customers in North America, Australia, and New Zealand. To get access to this feature, contact your Sales Account Manager or Lightspeed Support.

Covers are a way to organize an order or ticket. In terms of payments, the number of covers determines how many times the bill is split and can indicate the number of customers on a ticket (or check).

This report illustrates your cover data for a specified time period, offering you an idea of the party sizes that dine at your restaurant so that you can prepare your service accordingly. For example, a restaurant serving larger groups may want to staff extra servers to ensure guests don’t experience a delay in service.

Accessing the Covers report

Advanced Insights organizes your covers data in a graph and table. To get started, choose your location and time frame.

1. Sign in to your Advanced Insights dashboard.
2. In the main navigation menu, click Sales. On the Sales page, select the Covers tab.
3. At the top of the navigation menu, click the Location drop-down and select whether to run the report for a particular location or All locations.
4. By default, the report displays data for the last 28 days. To choose a different time frame, click the calendar drop-down in the upper right corner. Optionally, click Custom to specify the time period using a calendar, but you cannot select a date range longer than three months.

Filtering the report

After running the report, you can filter your data or compare it for two different time periods.

1. To filter your results, use the View by drop-down and select Day or Week.
   
   
   
   
2. To compare two time periods, use the Compare to drop-down and select from Previous period, Previous year, or Daily averages.
   
   

For a description of each comparison type, see the table below.

Comparison type descriptions

Understanding the Covers bar graph

The Covers bar graph is a visual representation of your covers data. Hover over the graph for a breakdown of cover amounts by week or day. If you compare your data to another period of time, the breakdown also shows the increase or decrease in the number of covers. For a description of each metric, see the table below.

Covers metrics

Understanding the Covers table

The Covers table can be filtered by day or week and by location for a specified period of time. If you are comparing time periods, the table also displays the percentage increase (in green) or decrease (in red) in gross sales.

For a description of each column, see the table below.

Covers columns