[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!

[aswb9114]

With the Sell-Through Report — is there anyway your team would consider adding additional fields/columns such as "description" or "vendor"? We actually used this report this year as Part II of our annual inventory count, as a way to determine which books (we own a bookstore) we needed to return back to the publisher for credit on our account based on sales numbers for the last 6 months. What made this difficult is we couldn't sort it by publisher (which is the vendor field, in Square's case), so that meant creating a separate spreadsheet that was sorted by vendor, so we can return the items back to the publishers. 

Aside from this report, is there a chance the team would consider finding a smoother way to create a purchase order for a specific vendor from the sell-through report?

Thanks! -Christina

[ZedAndEssAdmin]

Is there any way to print a report of current in-stock items? We'd love to have this option for when it's inventory time! We don't need every item we've ever carried to be printed (as we can right now with printing an item report) - JUST the in-stock options. This would make inventory go a lot faster for us, since we don't carry much inventory on hand at any one time.

[dp2012]

I would like a report that shows my "Inventory Valuation" at a specific point in time.  Each year end I have to calculate my Inventory Valuation and provide it to my accountant.  How can I do this with Square's reports?

[NCHSPTSA]

Do you anticipate the transactions reporting will get improved so that individual names will be added? The last four numbers of their credit card doesn't tell me who they are and I have to match orders made on our Weebly site.

[pfab]

As Im going through my day to day, it would be nice if I could filter by payment method, dates and even category and products.  trying to find transactions to match in quickbooks is very difficult.  It would be nice to be able to filter through transactions that have been paid with checks or debit/credit cards.  I input the checks into the field box and being able to see that info would be great. 

[pfab]

Just thought of another example, we are an alarm company and every month we need to submit to our city a report of new security alarm customers.  I would like to be able to sort through all the security alarm customers and be able to download their address email and name to send to the city. 

[LacquerCo]

The sales attributed to an employee versus the sales collected by an employee creates confusion when trying to determine the proper amount to pay for commission.  Is there an easier way this can be reported?

[LacquerCo]

In Team Sales, when you click on a particular employee to see the detail of their sales, why can't that report be pulled up and printed?  If there is more than one page of data, you can only print the first page.  

[bbbhoneyfarm]

I WOULD LIKE TO SEE MY REPORTS AS YEAR VS YEAR EG.  DEC 2022 VS DEC 2023

[KramerDrive]

We have 2 locations. A Wholesale Locations where everything is invoiced and shipped to retailers.

The second, is a Retail Location, a brick and mortar retail gift shop.

Wholesale Location - reports need to break down costs for our retailers by selected dates for total spent. Currently "total spent" is for the entire time they have been a customer. We break down top stores for 4th quarter by sales since holidays are our busiest time of year and we offer incentives for top stores.

Retail Location - report for gift cards - which cards are open, tracking a specific gift card. Reports for more than just 1 years worth. This may be possible under custom reports but we have not been able to figure it out.

Retail Location - Reports for "insights" under Customers - helpful to be able to see who is new, who visits frequently. We would love to be able to see a total new customer growth broken down into month, year, etc.

[KramerDrive]

In regards to the customer insight reports - it would be helpful to see what items those new customers bought so we can see what is trending.

[MStewart1]

I used the free trial of Square Retail and that was great and all but I believe some of those reporting features should be free or like $5 a month. I don't need the vendors (I keep track of that on my own) but having profit margins and cost of goods on my reports would be great. Any chance of adding some of the reporting features to Square Retail free or maybe making a small plan just for a few added on report systems? Mainly cost of goods and profit margins.

[ChocoRee]

I figured out how to find transaction data and export a report. Could Square make this a linear report? My specific needs relate to reconciling Square Savings with QBO. The current report categorizes SqS as "Adjustment" in a line above the daily transaction data, making it more difficult to manipulate the data. I requested earlier if the Square and QBO could sort out the SqS pull. Currently it is incorrectly lumped together in QBO as "Square Fees."

[pfab]

I dont know if its possible, but this has to do with the balances.  we have set up several savings folders.  If somehow we could be able to send certain invoices paid to a particular savings folder, that would be SO AWESOME!  Right now, we have to go through all invoices paid and look for the recurring invoices tally those up for that day MINUS taxes and send that over to the savings folder.  Also not all invoices have tax since some have given us their tax exempt forms.  So if we could just be able to tell square to send only taxed invoices to the savings folder would be awesome too!  I will say, we do love using those savings folders.  

[MonicasAttic]

I love that I can do an inventory adjustment for losses (theft, breakage etc) but it's almost a useless feature if I can't pull a report to find out what inventory was adjusted and why.

Right now, we adjust the inventory AND have to keep a manual record. 

If we can put the data in, we'd like to be able to get the data out.

[dcerge]

It would be great if the app had the following features:

1. display total collected / sales on the checkout/favorites screen so an employee knows how much they made during his shift (they work for commission)

2. in our case, there are employees who sometimes share shifts and work with the same terminal. As all the employees get commissions and to simplify employees' life (so they do not have to enter their codes each time) I do the commission calculations manually for those shared shifts. Ideally, the app should allow doing this automatically when it understands that there is more than one employee per shift per terminal

3. have more slots in the favorites section or allow customization of what menu items to place on a single favorite slot

4. have API that allows creating an order in a web app that takes payment via terminal. Currently, I can create an order using the API and then send the amount to pay to the terminal via a special URL that opens the Square app that in turn charges the user for the specific amount. Though in the transactions I see just the paid amount without the ordered items and the order remains unpaid.

[dcerge]

As per the inventory feature of the application, in addition to MONICASATTIC, it would be nice to have inventory for items that are not sold as products but used to make them. For example, we sell coffee, tea, and other hot drinks. Each drink has 3 sizes: small, medium, and large. For this, we need to have cups of 3 sizes, sleeves of the same size, and cup lids. So, no matter what hot drink we sell we spend one cup (as per size), one sleeve, and one cup lid.

Now, we need to manually calculate how many were used to order new cups/sleeves/etc when they are running out.

It would be great if the app allowed us to do the calculations automatically by specifying dependencies for products we sell and keeping the dependencies inventory somewhere like with menu items.

[dcerge]

The transactions page in the Android app does not allow searching transactions by item sold. Also, when scrolling through transactions and then looking into transaction details, and then going back to the list of transactions the app scrolls the list to the top and I need to scroll down again. To be honest it is really annoying. It would be great if the usability and functionality of the page have been improved.

[dcerge]

We use a barcode scanner along with the Square Android app. In this case, the screen keyboard stops working (not displaying). For example, an employee scans some items, then the customer pays by cash and gives $25. The amount is not present among the suggested amounts ($1, $2, etc) so the employee taps on the "Custom" button to enter the amount but no keyboard is displayed until they disconnect the barcode scanner.

[Tom]

Hello everyone!

The time for receiving new questions has closed for this event. Thank you to everyone who asked questions and shared their experiences — we received a lot of helpful feedback!

The Square Reporting team will continue to address your posts as they are able. Due to the high volume of interest across all of our forums, it may take a few days to follow up on remaining inquires. We appreciate your patience and please keep watch for updates throughout the end of the week and early next week. 🙏🏻

[hakkachopsticks]

If you ever need a tester for products, kindly reach out as I have experience in testing products and finding bugs.

Thanks!