LS Central reports worth running: the built-in list for store managers

Reporting · 7 min read

Business Central ships with a long list of built-in reports, and LS Central adds its own POS reports on top. Most of them will never answer a question a store manager actually asks. A short list will — if each one is run at the moment its answer can still change a decision. This guide ranks that short list by cadence: what to check daily, what to review weekly, and what to run at period-end before the numbers are treated as final.

Start with the question, not the report list

Every report below is tied to one question and one decision. If a report is not feeding a decision — reorder, investigate, recount, reprice, post — it is decoration, no matter how tidy it looks. The other filter is honesty about layers: some of what follows runs on the POS, some runs in the Business Central back office, and one popular option is not built in at all. Keeping those layers separate prevents the classic disappointment of looking for a back-office report on a terminal, or expecting a terminal report to reconcile the general ledger.

Daily: the POS X and Z reports

The X report is the mid-flight check. According to LS Retail's documentation, it shows the store and terminal, the staff member, total sales including and excluding tax, total net sales, discounts, rounding, tax grouped by tax group, and sales grouped by item category. It also counts paying customers, transactions, and items sold, and lists refunds, suspended transactions, voided transactions, training transactions, drawer openings, and logins, along with cash totals, currency totals, and float movements — cash added, tender removed, and the net of the two. That combination answers the daily question that matters most: does the till's story match the day so far, and is anything unusual — voids, refunds, drawer openings — creeping up before close?

The Z report carries the same information as the X report, with two additions noted in the documentation: a serial number drawn from an uninterrupted ascending series for Z reports, and a marker showing that it is the daily Z report. In practical terms, the X report is for looking, and the Z report is the day's formal record. Run the X report when something feels off during the day; treat the Z report as part of the close, filed with the day's paperwork rather than printed and forgotten. Neither report replaces the statement routine — for the full close sequence, see the end-of-day routine.

Weekly: what sold, and what it sold for

Three built-in Business Central reports cover the weekly sales review without any add-on. The Inventory Top 10 List (report 711) reviews the highest or lowest selling items by quantity and amount over a selected period, and Microsoft positions it as an aid to purchase planning. Run it weekly per store and it answers the simplest useful question in retail: what actually moved, and what quietly stopped moving?

The Inventory Customer Sales report (713) analyses customer sales per item and weighs the relationship between discounts, sales amounts, and sales volume, and the Customer/Item Sales report (113) approaches the same ground from the customer side, analysing item sales per customer. For a small store these two overlap, and that is fine — pick the orientation that matches the question. Item-first answers “who buys this, and at what discount?” Customer-first answers “what does this customer actually buy from us?” Running both every week is duplication, not diligence.

Where staff performance is part of the review, Salesperson – Sales Statistics (114) analyses sales and profitability per salesperson, including revenue contribution, margins, and the effect of discounts. That discount column is the reason to run it: two staff members with identical sales totals can have very different margins once discounting is counted, and the report separates the two stories.

Weekly: availability and movements before they become surprises

Inventory Availability (705) reviews current and future availability of items or stock-keeping units and helps surface potential shortages or surpluses by weighing inventory against supply and demand. Run it before the weekly order, not after a shelf gap has already been noticed by a customer. Its companion for investigations is Inventory – Transaction Detail (704), which reviews inventory movements — sales, purchases, and stock transfers — for a selected item over a time period, showing the movements behind the current quantity on hand. When a stock figure looks wrong, this is the report that shows how it got that way; guessing from the shelf count alone rarely finds the stray transfer or the mis-received delivery.

Period-end: valuation and reconciliation

The one report on this list that finance will ask about by name is Inventory Valuation. Microsoft describes it (report 1001) as reconciling the inventory subledger with the inventory accounts in the general ledger at the end of each period, analysing changes to expected costs posted during the period, and determining the value of on-hand inventory for financial reporting. In the United States, Canada, and Mexico, the localized Inventory Valuation report (10139) is used instead. This is a period-end report, not a weekly habit: run it as part of the close, per store or location group, and keep the output with the period's records so a later difference can be traced instead of debated.

The short list at a glance

A 15-minute weekly routine

1. Open the Top 10 List for the last seven days, per store. Note the bottom of the list as carefully as the top — a former seller falling off is a signal, not a footnote.
2. Run Inventory Availability for the same stores. Mark any item that is both selling and heading for a shortage; those get ordered first.
3. Pick one orientation — item or customer — and run that sales report. Look specifically at discount-heavy lines: high volume bought with deep discounts is a margin decision, not a win, until someone decides it is deliberate.
4. Spot-check one suspicious quantity with Transaction Detail. Choose the item whose shelf and system counts disagreed most during the week and walk its movements until the gap is explained.
5. Write down the decisions. Reorders placed, items to recount, discounts to stop. A report that produced no decision two weeks running drops off the routine.

What success looks like: the routine ends with a short list of actions with owners, the availability exceptions are ordered or consciously deferred, and any unexplained quantity has a named follow-up — not a folder of printed reports nobody read.

When built-in reports stop being enough

One caution about scope. Analytics for LS Central is a separate layer: LS Retail documents it as a set of Power BI report templates — Sales, Finance, Inventory, Supply chain, Hospitality, Bookings, and Actionable Insights, plus a Hotels template where that extension is present — built to connect to an Analytics data warehouse. Its Sales report adds views the built-in list does not offer, including net sales, margin, and quantity broken down by item hierarchy, store, time of day, day of week, staff, and member, with detail on discounted sales. That is genuinely useful for multi-store trend work — but it is a project with a data warehouse behind it, not a menu item in the back office. Exhaust the built-in list first; most single-store questions never need more. Also skip the reports Microsoft itself flags as legacy for sales analysis, such as the old Customer – Top 10 list and Customer – Sales list: the current reports above cover the same questions without a dead end.

Reporting note: report totals are only as reliable as the postings behind them. Figures that affect financial statements, tax filings, or supplier claims should be verified against the posted entries and, where the stakes warrant it, with the accountant or partner who owns the setup — this guide is orientation, not financial advice.