Introducing Heartbeat: Live Raffle Sales Monitoring

During a live raffle event, your team needs to know one thing above all else: how are sales going right now? Not an hour ago, not when someone last checked — right now. Heartbeat is a new tool in Lightspeed built to answer that question at a glance, 24/7, whether you’re watching at 2 PM or checking in at 6 AM.

The Sales Velocity Ticker

At the center of Heartbeat is a stock-ticker-style velocity card. It shows your total revenue as a big, unmissable number with a live sparkline chart drawn behind it — a visual pulse of how sales are moving. Below the main number you’ll see the dollar change and percentage change versus the prior period, just like watching a stock.

The time-window pill selector lets you zoom between eight granularities:

• 1M, 5M, 10M, 30M — Short-burst windows for tracking momentum during promotional pushes or social media spikes
• 1H, 3H — Shift-length windows for comparing morning vs. afternoon performance
• 24H — Full-day view to see yesterday-to-today trends
• 7D — Full-week view to spot multi-day sales patterns and plan your next push

Each window shows the sales delta, ticket delta, and percentage change against the preceding period of the same length. The mini-stats row at the bottom gives you all eight windows at a glance so you can instantly spot which timeframes are accelerating and which are cooling off.

Vital Signs

The top row of Heartbeat surfaces your key performance indicators in large, scannable cards:

• Total Sales — Cumulative revenue with a formatted dollar display
• Total Tickets — Tickets sold across all package tiers
• Avg. Ticket Value — Revenue per ticket, useful for tracking upsell success
• Time Remaining — Countdown to your raffle close date

Surge Detection

Heartbeat automatically detects sales surges — periods where revenue in the current window significantly outpaces the prior period. When a surge is active, you’ll see a prominent alert banner with the percentage increase and the time window driving it. This makes it easy to correlate real-time results with marketing campaigns, email blasts, or social media posts.

Payment Mix & Package Breakdown

A donut chart shows your credit, cash, and debit payment distribution at a glance. Beside it, a sales waterfall breaks down revenue by package tier so you can see which price points are driving volume versus revenue. This data updates live alongside everything else.

Goal Tracker

Set a sales target and Heartbeat shows a visual progress bar with percentage completion, dollars remaining, and a projected completion estimate based on current velocity. Great for team huddles or display screens in the office.

Persistent Data — No More Overnight Gaps

Previous versions of Lightspeed stored velocity snapshots in a temporary file that was wiped on every server restart or redeploy. That meant you’d wake up to a blank sparkline every morning.

Heartbeat now stores every data point in a dedicated PostgreSQL table. Snapshots survive restarts, redeploys, and infrastructure changes. When the server boots, it loads your full 7-day history from the database instantly. The 24H and 7D time windows are only useful because the data is finally there to back them up.

We also added failure resilience: if the upstream raffle feed is temporarily unreachable, Heartbeat records the last known values so the timeline stays continuous. No more unexplained gaps in the sparkline.

Always Collecting, Always Ready

Heartbeat collects data every 90 seconds in the background, whether anyone has the page open or not. When you navigate to Heartbeat at any time — morning, evening, weekend — the full historical timeline is already there waiting for you. A health monitoring system logs collection statistics every 30 minutes so your team can verify data integrity at any time from the server logs.

Live Orders Feed

Below the velocity card, a real-time Shopify order feed shows your most recent ticket purchases as they come in — customer name, amount, and fulfillment status. It’s the heartbeat of your raffle in the most literal sense.