Every point of sale (POS) system has pros, cons, limitations, and quirks. We strive to take advantage of every aspect of a given systems' API to give you the most seamless, automated experience possible. Our team has fine-tuned the marriage between your POS and the Run Free Project platform. Unfortunately, like all marriages, our control and communication abilities are limited.

One such limitation exists within the Lightspeed API. In orders that traverse the API, taxes are calculated by Lightspeed on the total sale value of an item before discounts. Unlike other POS systems, Lightspeed's ecommerce APIs do not allow us to calculate the tax and pass it in with the order, we must assign a pre-defined or generated Tax Category Id and pass said ID. Their system automatically calculates the taxes on a per item basis. As such, they use the total value of each line item for the calculation, since many regions have differing tax rates on various categories of goods.

Lightspeed's API also does not allow discounts to be applied on a per item basis. They force discounts to be apply to the total cart value. We accommodate for this limitation on the Run Free platform such that the customer experience is the same across all POS systems. However, due to Lightspeed's unique discount constraint, there is a possibility that a slight overage (think pennies) in tax may be collected when your customers use coupon codes or place ecommerce sales.

We are continuously monitoring Lightspeed's API changes, so if the ability to apply tax on the discounted amount of a transaction becomes available, we will adjust how we pass information to them accordingly.