What aspect of running your business takes the most time out of each day? 🤔

[isabelle]

Hi all! Hope everyone is having a fabulous last week of September! 

Today we're wondering....

What aspect of running your business takes the most time out of each day? 🤔

Excited to read your replies! ⚡️

[HC_Charlie]

Hello @JK_Fiber_Art just wondering if your online store is also by Square? and if you have your inventory linked together? I was having a similar issue, and many times I didn't act fast enough to mark inventory sold (ughhhh!) We have both online and in-Store  Square Register now so our inventory links, it works really well!

[JK_Fiber_Art]

Hi @HC_Charlie,

We are using the free Square online store however, our business is a bit different from most as almost everything we sell is handmade in our Studio Gallery - basically one of a kind - no two are alike.  For example, we have hand quilted Wall Hangings and Fabric Pins - each wall hanging is a different size, design, price, etc., same scenario for the fabric pins.  This is where keeping an inventory is a challenge for us as there's only 1 each of whatever we have.  So we setup our shop register items very generic - you would seen "Wall Hangings", "Pins", "Clothing", "Misc", etc.   When we sell a wall hanging, all we do is select "Wall Hanging", enter the price and a short description.  Very simple.   As for any item that is currently online, it has to be more specific so the customer knows exactly what they are getting.  If we sell an item that's in the Gallery and have the same item listed on the website, then the item on website has to be removed or replaced with something different.  There's no automated may to do that.   The good news is there's only a small number of items on the website, they are just there so people an idea of what we do.   Good to hear that what you have setup works !!!

JK

[HC_Charlie]

I'd say anything with putting new inventory on our website. Once I add first in the Square Register, it's not too hard to setup for the website. I think writing descriptions/taking photos and uploading that info takes me the longest. If I get into a groove and do a batch of items, it doesn't seem to take long. But if I'm away from it too long, it takes me a few moments to get myself back into the "headspace" of working on these. I find myself waiting too long to update/maintain the website and I really should do it more often....along with marketing emails, social media posts, etc.....WOW, I'm feeling really behind now. Better get something done.

OH, FYI I spent this afternoon getting Christmas ornaments and cards out on the sales floor. I KNOW ! I don't like doing this early, and never have, but this year retailers are being encouraged to start early and get sales in sooner rather than later.

[BofBArtStudio]

Supply Chains are still a problem and we are faced with spending a bunch of time searching for the products we need when suppliers are out of stock.

I used to spend a ton of time on entering and receiving inventory because we have five stores on square and five website stores.  Now it is easy to sync it all together and keep everything on track.  Plus we promoted one of our team members to Inventory Specialist, so I don't have to do that much any more.  😊

Now I just spend a bunch of time answering/sending emails, meetings, website development, social media marketing, photos of products (especially our one-of-a-kind hand-made products).  

Seven years into the business and I have tried to create the right kind of processes and have the right people on the team so that I can spend my time ON the business instead of IN the business.  Although, I really love being at the shop and seeing all of our regular guests.  

❤️🦋

[dhegel]

scheduling and re-scheduling staff -filling in for missing people.  We are running about 20% short on our labor pool, so when people are out sick, don't show up for work, etc. it strains the staff and I have to figure out how to keep our place staffed well enough to keep the doors open.

[sebc]

Splitting Tips for payroll. If Square could allow employees to see there tips for the day without giving them accesses to all of our information that would save me 5 hours a week and a lot of paper and envelops, splitting and printing off tip reports. Our employees split all tips equally so tracking tips by employees will not work.

[BofBArtStudio]

Do you use Square Payroll?  We have our tip pool settings set up to split the tip pool equally between the employees rather than specific to which employee handled the transaction that generated the tip.  A couple of years ago, we used to have to calculate tips in a spreadsheet, but the tip pooling feature in Square Payroll really has made a difference for us, and now payroll takes a few minutes each week and a couple button clicks.

[TBrown50]

Payroll is on top of my list for time consumption along with the day to day operations of administrative work, scheduling, inventory, ordering, following on inquiries, etc. Love using Square for ease of labor costs (though I don't use payroll), reports, customer feedback. Have gotten so many other POS offers from other merchants - but no way!

[Wrcreations]

Marketing/ communicating with clients and branding myself.

[cleaningteamnyc]

For us, it's client calls, we have a really quick and straightforward system. Eventually, we hope to get away from having a phone system. But for now it works. 

[teambryant21]

An aspect that takes the most time out of the day... The aspect we have is a good one which is talking to our customers through email, phone calls, etc. After all our customers are very patient, calm, collected, and very ideal of what they want. Yes it make take the most time out of the day but we are getting to know our customers, so when next time they order we know and understand the kind of things they like.

Go shop at Team Bryant Clothing Line:  https://team-bryant-clothing-line.square.site/ 

[WiltonPizzeria]

Trying to figure out what I need to do next.

[Minion]

Probably the most time consuming part of my business would be making the sale of my undercoating service.  Sure I can toss them a quick pitch on why the should do it, and the benefits of it. But There is much more involved, offering 4 different packages.  So man aspects come in to play like how old the vehicle is, what type of vehicle, are they going to run it in the ground, or do they trade every few years.  Finding out more in depth information about the customers needs, and then recommending a package (not always the top tier one) takes a lot of time, but 90% of the time I end up securing the appointment. 

[Bardelcorso]

We use Square for our restaurant and we are pretty new to Square since we only started doing take-out in the first few months of March 2020 (a pandemic pivot) , so now more of our day is taken up managing the reservation and take out systems we put in place. Using Square for our take-out system was pretty seamless, but I still feel like I am not using the system to the best of it's capabilities so I can make the system run more efficiently for our team.

[pyopstudio]

For me it's planning and executing of classes and events. First planning the class, then finding a date for it, getting a sample made by myself or most often a staff member, then photographing the sample, getting a listing for the class onto the online scheduler I use,  putting the class out on social media to try to get people to sign up. 

[Chanswager]

Mine is mostly spent on traceability, I own a restaurant employees handle my sales, I cook full time and am the jack of all trades, so making sure that I have cameras every where, I can’t give them to many permissions in the system because next thing I know the whole town has Been comped, cash on tables and the tickets disappear, I would love for square to have better traceability, because it is a very important asset for most of our businesses, I spend hours a night on this and still have to give up sometimes, I would like to see numbers such as batch numbers for each shift and know who’s number was associated with any part of the transactions, I know the technology is out there to do so, I would love to see so many little changes like that come along the number one reason most of us are here is for convince of managing our sales and inventory I think your register is beautiful I really don’t like the receipts # being gpj93, how are we supposed to trace that other than hours of looking up receipts that I believe had problems the batch and order numbers should be on all 3 tickets so you can easily trace them, then a batch report with starting and ending numbers would be amazing also the activity log is so so but I could give you info on a company that had the most amazing traceability reports you could even run a six month at a time audit on your sales staff tickets and figure out who was using each method and they accounted for any missing batch numbers or suspicious checks immediately we should at the very least be able to tell if a 0.00 number is a recipient or avoid and which table it’s hiding at, super time consuming also the end of the shift reports are causing allot of trouble, if I could actually split the shifts and not have to deal with 2 bags of deposit arguments then I would consider the on line sales allot harder than I’m willing to rite now with the reporting and permission settings we are using, this was bought as a business tool I actually was reset up on a old account that we had and ever once in a while one of there drawers will show up unclosed or a receipt I’m checking will have the same number as we used for years ago and pull one of those tickets up, we are using nothing that we had hardware wise or computer wise that would allow this except the internet is the same and our bank account

[LaBicyclette]

We're expanding so hiring takes up a lot of our time right now. It's difficult to find the right fit for both kitchen staff and FOH baristas, and we pay above market. Where are all the good people hiding?!

[DinaLRosenberg]

definitely inventory

aside from making sure inventory is entered in I think optimizing for online sales is the most time consuming.

it would be great if in the website e-commerce back end we can assort for those items with no photos, etc. sometimes we don't add full details in right away and intend to go back to the website "later"- well, sometimes it's ridiculously hard to remember what you need to optimize for online when you have over 2k products.

[TamaraTaylor]

Sending documentation! 

[Cheesecake1]

Well there's not 1 that sticks out. Production of Cheesecakes and setting up posts for what is available. I Make different types of Cheesecake for my daily slice sales. I have to post on Facebook,  missing Instagram, and text to the regular customers that don't use Facebook. The general public Very time consuming. 

[LunaLighthouse]

Listing inventory! Especially when Square is in a bad moon and won't sync my inventory amounts! 😖