Exporting your data from Lightspeed X-Series: every CSV that matters

Here's the quiet superpower of Lightspeed Retail X-Series: no matter which plan you're on, your data is exportable. Advanced reports are gated by plan — Lightspeed's basic vs. advanced reporting doc says the sell-through, dusty inventory, and recently-out-of-stock reports "are not available on the discontinued Pro and the current Core plans" — but the raw data behind them exports as CSV or XLSX on every plan, per Lightspeed's own docs on exporting reporting data and exporting sales data.

Three exports cover almost every analysis a small store needs. Here's each one: where it lives, what's in it, and what trips people up. (This page doubles as the onboarding doc for ShelfReport — these are exactly the files it reads.)

Export 1: The product list (your catalog + inventory + costs)

Where: the Products page in Retail POS — use Export list. Lightspeed's walkthrough: Exporting your product list.

What's in it: one row per product/variant. Expect columns along the lines of SKU, handle, product name, brand, supplier, supply price (your cost), retail price, tax, active status, and per-outlet inventory counts — often with reorder point and reorder amount columns if you've set them. Exact header names vary a little between accounts; don't rename them, and any decent tool (ShelfReport included) will match the common variants automatically.

Which analyses need it: all of them. This file is your on-hand quantities and your costs — without it you can't price dead stock or check margins.

Format gotcha, straight from Lightspeed's docs: choose XLSX for up to 5,000 products, CSV for larger lists — and be careful with CSV, because SKUs with a leading 0 or more than 14 characters are often altered when a CSV is opened in Excel (Excel treats the SKU column as a number, strips the zero, or converts it to scientific notation). Exporting as XLSX avoids it; if you must use CSV, import it with the SKU column forced to Text, per Lightspeed's guide on formatting a CSV file in Excel.

Export 2: Sales history (the line-level record)

Where: Sell > Sales history. Set your filters (status, customer, outlet, user, date), click Search, then Export list. Lightspeed's docs: Exporting your sales data.

What's in it: individual sales with dates, receipt numbers, products/SKUs, quantities, prices, and totals. This is the file that tells you when each SKU last sold and how fast it sells — the raw material for dead-stock and velocity math.

The 1,000-sale limit: each export covers up to your last 1,000 sales. For a store doing 60 sales a day, that's about two weeks — nowhere near the 12 months you want for a dead-stock analysis. The fix is in Lightspeed's own guide, How to export all sales over a certain time period: filter by explicit date ranges and export month by month (or week by week in busy season), then stack the files into one sheet. Tedious, but it works on every plan.

Which analyses need it: dead stock (last sale date per SKU), reorder risk (units per day), and the stockout side of cash leakage.

Export 3: Reporting exports (pre-aggregated numbers)

Where: the Reporting section — sales, inventory, payment, and tax reports each export via the Export button as XLSX or CSV, per Exporting your reporting data.

The one Core-plan merchants should know: the basic inventory replenishment report is available on Core and summarizes closing inventory, items sold, and days cover, with optional reorder point measures. Export it and you have a ready-made reorder-risk snapshot: anything with days cover shorter than your supplier lead time is a stockout waiting to happen.

Which analyses need it: reorder risk, and cross-checking totals from your own spreadsheet math.

Which file feeds which report

You want	Product list	Sales history	Replenishment export
Dead stock report (how-to with formulas)	Yes — on-hand + cost	Yes — 12 months	Optional
Reorder risk	Yes — reorder points	Yes — 90 days for velocity	Yes — days cover
Cash leakage estimate (the concept)	Yes — costs + prices	Yes — 12 months	Optional

Gotchas that ruin an afternoon

• Date ranges. Always set explicit start/end dates before exporting; a default "recent" window silently truncates your history and makes healthy sellers look dead. For dead stock you want 12 months minimum, or slow seasonal items will all false-positive.
• Outlet filters. Multi-outlet stores: decide up front whether you're analyzing one location or all, and keep every export consistent. A product can be dead at one outlet and a top seller at another — merged data hides that; per-outlet data reveals it.
• Excel mangling. The SKU issue from Export 1 also hits dates (regional format flips like 03/07 vs 07/03) and long barcodes. Prefer XLSX; if using CSV, import rather than double-click.
• Returns and refunds. They appear as negative quantities in sales history. Keep them — netting them out is the honest picture of what actually sold.
• Variants are separate rows. Each size/color is its own SKU line in the product export. That's what you want; just don't double-count parent rows if your export includes handles grouping them.
• Costs can be blank. Products imported without a supply price export with an empty cost column, which silently zeroes them out of any dead-stock dollar total. Count your blanks before trusting the totals — this is itself a finding (see the data-errors section of the cash leakage guide).

Got the files? That's the hard part done.

The three exports above are all ShelfReport needs. Upload them and the free scan returns your headline numbers — dead stock dollars, reorder risks, likely leakage — in a couple of minutes, with the full ranked report available for $79 one-time. No subscription, no integration, and your files never feed anything else. Run a free scan →

Related guides

• How to get a dead stock report on Lightspeed's Core plan
• Lightspeed Insights alternatives for small stores (2026)
• Cash leakage: the number your POS never shows you

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ShelfReport is an independent tool and is not affiliated with, endorsed by, or sponsored by Lightspeed Commerce. "Lightspeed" and "X-Series" are trademarks of Lightspeed Commerce Inc. Export behavior and doc references checked July 1, 2026; menus and limits can change — Lightspeed's linked support articles are the source of truth.