Finding your way around

Every page in the web app has the same frame: the sidebar on the left with the pages you can open, a slim top bar with your notifications, and the page itself. On a phone-sized screen the sidebar becomes a tab bar at the bottom (see On a phone browser).

trylasi.com/dashboard

Above the page content you may see a coloured banner about billing (for example while the trial has not started) and, for admins of a new business, the Finish setting up checklist. Both go away on their own.

When you sign in, LASI opens on your role’s start page: Inventory for admins and managers, Auctions for hosts and staff, Returns for customer service. The LASI logo at the top of the sidebar always takes you back there.

The top of the sidebar is the daily work, in the order it happens:

Tools

The things you open now and then: Forecast, Calculators, Schedule and Scanner. On a computer the Tools group starts closed; click its title to open it. It opens by itself when you are on one of its pages.

Analytics

Admins see Analytics, Streams, Sales, Finance and Commission. Managers see Sales and Streams, because the others are built on costs and profit. This group starts open.

At the bottom

Settings and Help, then the email you are signed in as with a sign-out button, and Collapse, which shrinks the sidebar to icons (hover an icon for its name; the same button expands it again).

Each role’s sidebar lists only the pages that role can open, so nobody meets a link that bounces them.

Settings is only in the sidebar for admins and managers. The full picture of what each role can do is in Your team and roles.

• The bell opens your notifications (next section). A red number on it counts what is waiting.
• Scanner (on a computer) jumps straight to the Scanner, for roles that have it.
• On a phone-sized screen the top bar also carries the LASI logo, which takes you to your start page.

A round button with a sparkle in the bottom-right corner of every page opens Ask LASI, the help assistant, without leaving the page (when the assistant is switched on for your account).

LASI tells you when something needs a person. Each notification appears once in the bell, and on your phone as a push notification if you use the LASI iPhone app and allowed notifications.

trylasi.com/dashboard

The bell holds three kinds of thing:

• Reorder warnings — Order now: or Order soon: and a product, with the date it is expected to run dry. They clear themselves once the product is marked ordered or restocked.
• Notifications — a show ready to close, a daily reorder digest, a packer who has gone quiet, boxes near their ship-by deadline, a replacement request filed or decided, a return request waiting, and so on. Tap one to open what it is about; Dismiss removes it.
• Shopify alerts — a Shopify sale LASI could not match to stock. Match lets you pick the item and size so it is marked sold; Dismiss removes the alert.

Clear all empties the list. When nothing is waiting it reads No new notifications.

Who gets which notification

Notifications follow the same rules as the pages: anything about money or the whole business goes to admins (and managers when it is about revenue or operations), and a notification about your own request goes only to you. Some notifications retire themselves when the problem is fixed — a show’s “ready to close” disappears once it is finalized.

The Help item at the bottom of the sidebar opens quick, searchable answers about how LASI works, filtered to your role. At the top is Ask LASI, an assistant you can ask in plain words — “What does reconciling do?”, “Why does my show say no revenue?” — and it answers from how the app works.

trylasi.com/help

• Search help… filters the answers as you type. If nothing matches, ask the assistant.
• Replay the welcome tour shows the first-login tour again.
• The assistant knows how LASI works but cannot see your data — it cannot tell you last night’s sales. For questions about your own numbers, see LASI with Claude.

This guide goes deeper than the Help page, chapter by chapter.

The Scanner is a dark, phone-first part of the web app made for working on the floor with a phone’s camera. It opens on a menu of big buttons:

• Create Auction and Stage Auction — start a show and move stock onto the set.
• Join Live — sell during a running show.
• SKU Live Auction — a scan-to-sell show.
• Receive Inventory — admins and managers only.
• Quick Scan — scan any barcode to see what it is. A product’s own UPC shows its catalog item, how many are in stock and (admins only) what you paid.

Below the buttons it counts the shows currently staging and live. Most teams now do this work in the LASI iPhone app, which does the same jobs with the phone’s native camera; see The LASI iPhone app.

A USB or Bluetooth barcode scanner acts like a keyboard: it types the code and presses Enter. LASI’s scanning screens — the packing bench, the Returns desk, Scan in items and Catalog barcodes — listen for that anywhere on the page, so you do not need to click into a box first. What you type into a field yourself is left alone.

• On a phone or tablet, the scanning screens use the camera instead. The browser asks for camera permission the first time; allow it.
• The same barcode twice — on Scan in items, each scan of the same barcode adds one more to the count. Catalog barcodes, which only looks things up, ignores the same code for a few seconds, because a camera keeps reading the box it is pointed at.

Which scanners and printers work well is in Printers, scanners and cameras.

The web app works in a phone’s browser. On a narrow screen the sidebar is replaced by a tab bar at the bottom with two tabs and More:

trylasi.com/auctions

More opens a sheet with every other page your role can open, and Sign out at the bottom.

Both show the same business and update each other instantly. Use whichever suits the job:

The phone app’s own layout — Today, Shows, Inventory, Scan and Menu — is covered in The LASI iPhone app.

1. 1Open Settings → Account (admins and managers) — or, on the phone app, Menu → Appearance.
2. 2Under Appearance, choose Light, Dark or System (follows your device’s setting).

The choice is saved on that device only, so the bench computer can stay light while your laptop is dark. The Scanner, the packing bench and the live show screens are dark in both modes on purpose.

Every date in LASI — a show’s day, “today” on the dashboard, daily bars in reports — is your business’s calendar day in the timezone set under Settings → Business → Timezone, whatever the clock on your own computer says.

So a stream that runs from 10 PM to 1 AM Eastern belongs to the day it started, and a manager checking the dashboard from another timezone still sees the warehouse’s “today”. Return deadline countdowns run on LASI’s own clock, so a computer set to the wrong time cannot show a wrong deadline.

Most pages with tabs keep the tab in the address, so you can bookmark or share a link that opens exactly where you were, and the browser’s back button returns to the previous tab. For example /settings#shows opens Settings on the Shows group, and a Finance tab has its own address.