[CA] Square Reporting Q&A: Get answers and influence product decisions!

[Ani_]

Happy New Year, Seller Community! ✨

Effective and reliable reporting is crucial for the smooth operation of any business, and we recognize that there is always room for improvement with the reporting tools offered by Square.

Participate in the upcoming Square Reporting Q&A to let the team know what's going well and what can be improved — because who better to provide insight on how to improve these tools than the sellers who use them on a daily basis? 😉

This event is an opportunity to speak directly with @annakepler on the Square Reporting team, and contribute to how developments are prioritized throughout 2023.

On Wednesday, January 25, 2023, she and her team will be here to address any questions you may have, and make sure your experiences are documented with their plans for the year ahead.

Not sure what to ask? Here are some example questions: 

• What is the best way to keep an eye on sales trends for my items?
• If I could do "_________" with reporting in the online Square Dashboard, that would save me so much time.
• How can I manage sales reports across multiple business locations?

Click 'Reply' below to ask your question ahead of time, and we’ll answer every question on Wednesday, January 25, 2023. We're looking forward to hearing from you!

[annakepler]

Thank you for sharing the way you use the transactions report. I will pass your feedback on to the team.

[aboderoc]

I'd really love to see an easy Aging Inventory report so that we can know what needs to moved to sale.  It's very difficult to tell how long an item has been on the floor without going into each item history individually and calculating the age. 

[annakepler]

Hi @aboderoc ,

Thanks for your suggestion! We are actively working on new reporting features, so stay tuned!

Until then, if you are a Retail Plus subscriber, the Inventory sell-through report will be most helpful. The Inventory sell-through report provides an analysis of the sell-through rate for each item and forecasts when you will likely run out of stock. If you sort the report by Sell-through rate or Sales velocity, you can see which products are performing and moving quickly and which are not. 

You can find this report on Dashboard by navigating to Reports > Inventory Reports > Inventory sell-through.

Hope this helps!

[aboderoc]

I would love to be able to customize the sell-through rate on the exported sell-through report. Currently it seems to only offer "per day," which isn't relevant for our furniture business. 

[annakepler]

Thank you for the feedback @aboderoc !
I will take this back to the team. Can you help me understand what you would use instead of "per day" and share a little about how this information is useful for your business information? Your feedback helps us prioritize the work. 

[aboderoc]

For sure! I'd love to see how many of an item or category we tend to sell in a month for our larger items. It would help us to know about how many we should have on hand / on the floor at any one time. It would also be really helpful at discovering the seasonality of our categories and items - it's a big priority for us, and anything that would help to synthesize these larger trends would be REALLY valuable. We could get the right inventory at the right times, versus trying to carry a depth of everything at all times. 

[aboderoc]

And I should mention, being able to see this by item as well as by the leveled-up category (like "armchairs," for example) would be SO helpful.

[annakepler]

Thank you for the additional details. This is very helpful.

[AMPdUPNails]

Is there a way to move retired items to a non-dominate screen so that they don't come up during transactions.  I have lots of retired, that may come back, so I don't want to delete the items but would love to keep them out of daily use.

Also would like an easy way to raise the price on a category of items at once without having to go in and change each one manually.  With the way things are changing., it would be nice to be able to increase all items by $1  or all like items by $1 etc.

[Vendor]

Agree! Would love to be able to "disable" and not see an item without deleting it.. 

Best way to change bulk pricing is on the computer.. go to Items, Actions, Export Library... then changing the prices on Excel and then Importing the new spreadsheet.

For now, you can edit the Names of your items on Excel and import the new list.. if you use your phone, I would put a "Z" in the front of the name so all the ones you don't want to see will just be at the bottom of your list. I use an iPad and use Categories, so what I do is I change the Category of the items I don't want to see to a "Not in Stock" category.. and then change it back when I do want to see it again. It's seriously a pain and I wish they will add this feature you're requesting!

[Vendor]

But I think this request of ours is not related to Reports.. so not sure if this group will be answering this.... 

[RiceandRoux]

I believe there is an option under items, in the web browser dashboard, to bulk edit. You just click all the box of all of the items you want to edit and press the “Bill edit” button. I just did it today. 

[grovetealounge]

It doesn't solve the issue of them showing up in our dashboard when we log into Square from our computer, but to solve the issue of "retired" items, we go in to the item in question and remove it from all locations (a box near the top right under the description).  This keeps it in our system, but removes it from all our registers (or apps on devices that we use as registers when doing things off-site).  Not a perfect fix, but it's worked well for us so far - especially for those items that we bring back in the future or if we want to go back to refresh our memory of what we sold, the price we had on it, etc

[Vendor]

This helps me. THANK YOU!

[grovetealounge]

You're welcome! Glad I could help!

[annakepler]

Thank you for your feedback @AMPdUPNails ! I will take it back to our retail team. 

We are currently working on the archive functionality for the inventory and believe it should help with the experience. Stay tuned. 

[DrSpaceman]

I'd like to see several fields added to the item detail report export. 

Discount Used

Void/Comp Used

Customer ID of some kind 

With all these in the same place, I'd be able to do a lot more robust analysis in excel, and be significantly less limited by the default reports in Square. 

[annakepler]

Thank you for your post @DrSpaceman !

I will take your request back to the team. 
Can I ask what type of analysis you do with this data in Excel? Interested if that is something we can expose in the reports to get you information without the need to export and perform it yourself. 

[CuttingEtchS]

I have a few suggestions:

1. Why when I offer a discount does Square charge fees on the whole amount? I did not collect the whole amount so why should fees be charged on amounts not collected?

2. it would be great to have the option of creating Packing Slips. Many of my customers receive their product prior to invoice being due or it is shipped to a different location other than the billing address. It would be great to have the invoice easily converted to a Packing Slip.

3. Reports that allow us to compare to customized dates...for example I would like to compare sales of Nov 2022 to sales of Nov 2019, etc. I don't want to always compare to the exact day of previous week or year. 

Thank you!

[annakepler]

Thank you for your questions @CuttingEtchS !

I will take your feedback about fees and packing slips to the appropriate teams. 

As for the customized reporting time ranges and hours, we are working to introduce them. Thank you for sharing. 

[TechPotato]

It would save so much time doing taxes if there was a single period (ie. monthly, yearly, fiscal period) report that had Sales (less selected non-revenue categories), GST (HST, PST) collected, taxes paid on add-on services, and transaction fees. Available as a CSV would be a bonus.