Meet the Order Manager product team: Which workflows are most critical to managing orders? 📨🧾

[Tom]

Hi Seller Community,

Have questions about the Orders section on your Point of Sale or online Square Dashboard? Our product team wants to hear from you!

I'm thrilled to introduce you to @chada and @Aaron_Product, whose teams focus on order management. Whether you're set up with Square Point of Sale, Square for Retail, Square for Restaurants, or Square Online, this is an opportunity for you to ask questions and share feedback on the order manager’s role in managing your business, notifying you of new or updated orders, printing order tickets, or providing settings for configuring your order-specific workflows. 

Post your questions to this thread ahead of time and check back with us on Wednesday, June 29, at 11 a.m. PDT/2 p.m. EDT when their team responds. 

A few example questions:

• What are the latest feature improvements that will help me better manage orders with Square Online?

• If Square Order Manager could support "_______," the day-to-day operations at my restaurant would run so much smoother.

• I keep running into "_______" every time an order comes through at my retail store. What's the best practice for addressing this?

• What plans do you have for allowing me to configure Order Manager to suit the specific workflows of my business?

• Do you have any plans to improve the onboarding experience to Order Manager for new sellers or employees?
  
  

Note: We are not able to share specific details on our product roadmaps, though this information will be helpful as we continue to make improvements.

Click Reply below to post a question ahead of time, and we’ll address as many posts as we can on Wednesday, June 29.👇

[#2]

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 Order Manager 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. 🙏🏻

[spipes]

Thank you for the opportunity to comment.

I would like the revenue from an online order go into the date that it is picked up, not the date the order is placed.

[Aaron_Product]

Are you referencing the date the sale is attributed in your Sales Summary Report?

[Aaron_Product]

Hi @spipes ,

Where would you like that revenue reflected based on fulfillment date rather than sales date, within the Sales Summary Report or other reporting?

[rliotta419]

I would love the invoicing module to work along side with orders.  We do a lot of "custom" orders that you cant created in the items library.  I love the new added "Date of Service" feature on the invoices but once it is paid, the invoice is closed.  I would love to see it move over to the "orders screen" where order/invoice remains open until it is 'fulfilled' and then 'picked' up.  is there anything in the works to have this functionality?

[TWWW]

I have used Square at trade shows for years, but do not understand the difference (if any) betweeen POINT OF SALE and the nice square reader i have always used. When I tried to sign up for P.O.S. it "invited" me to open an account.

[bomnabi]

Hi! On a few of my online orders it automatically sends it for in store pick up when my customer isn’t even in state and opted in for shipping. Is this something on my end going wrong or is there somehow i can fix this? Thanks in advanced !

[Kat_Product]

Hi There! Would you mind sharing your site with us? Would love to drill in here to understand better where the problem lies. Also can you share what item was ordered when the fulfillment methods were wrong? Thanks!

[taylafazio]

I would love if the order manager supported labels. I sell ready to ship items and pre-orders. I would love to tag preorders so I can filter those out temporarily. 

I keep running into the being unable to change shipping numbers in order manager. Sometimes I get click happy and put in the wrong tracking number. I haven't found a way to go back and edit the tracking number. Additionally, do customer receive that tracking number via email? I oftentimes get emails that they never received an actual tracking number. I have not been using the shipping feature within Square. 

[Aaron_Product]

How would you want to be able to apply labels within order manger? And would you want to be able to just filter by those labels or also search by them? Would you want those to show up in any of your reports?

[instantchip]

What's the best way to use Square at live events when our e-commerce store is Shopify? Thanks!

[ronnewearth]

My online store has two quite separate functions. 1) to sell plants online nation wide 2) to order gift arrangements for local delivery. It would be most helpful to have order forms that were a bit more customizable. And if possible to have the correct order form for these two types of orders assigned to the order type.  Or to have one order form that can serve both functions if the order forms allow for customization. 

[twoboys57]

Well doing ok and try to keep busy ....thanks for the email...

[wailani]

Can we:

-Turn POS transactions to ORDERS to process like WEBSITE ORDERS with a shipping method and sync with shipping apps, etc

-Allow POS ORDERS to convert to ORDERS without payment for CALL IN ORDERS that will be paying with CASH or CHECK upon pick up/delivery for their order.

-For WEBSITE orders, allow us to choose a deadline or specific date and time on items when ready for pick up or shipping, NOT  a "processing time" like 1 hour, 2 hour.  It should have another option that says Custom Date and Time to create when adding the ITEM to the WEBSITE side.  I know we are able to do this after the order comes through, but it would be much more helpful to be able to choose it when creating/editing the item on the WEBSITE side. 

-ADD A DEBIT OR CREDIT option for CARD payment options for ONLINE CHECKOUT OR WEBSITE ORDERS.  Even if Square processes the same rate and treats them the same way, IT IS ILLEGAL to charge DEBIT CARDS the CREDIT CARD surcharge fee.

-ALLOW MODIFICATIONS TO ORDERS instead of having to cancel/refund items altogether and create new tickets/orders etc

[Gettincraftywit]

1. I'd like to have a shop on Instagram but saw that squarespace wasn't an option. 

2. How can i sell multiple items for one price,

[mythicrunning]

We love the integrated purchase order function  and receiving notifications for online orders.  We are a specialty run store so we have many customers for whom we order shoes.  

Our customer orders are primarily (95%) generated in store/in-person when a customer requests a variation (usually size or color) of an item that we carry but do not have in the store.  Generally, this means that the item variation is not in the Item Library so we cannot create an invoice, order, or cart while the customer is in the store. 

We track these customer requests through a spreadsheet in another application.  When we create a Purchase Order for the requested item, we use the notes field to input the customer's name.  This is the only place in Square that we have the customer associated with the item. 

Once we receive the item, we create a Saved Cart and call or text the customer their items has arrived.  We print the Saved Cart slip and attach it to the item.  The customer then comes in to try on the shoes before making the purchase.  

Creating an invoice doesn't work in this scenario (we do invoice customers who place orders through channels other than online and in-store; ie message or calls that are then shipped).   

What we need for our work flow:

• the ability to connect the customer to the Purchase Order
• have a Cart created when the item is received
• have the item not show in inventory when it's in a Saved Cart
• automatically add the customer's contact info (not just name) to the Cart Name

In the Purchase Order report, it  would be helpful to have a line that indicated what's in the Purchase Order. 

[Jenthom08]

I would really like to be able to take an order in Square for retail and have the option to not take payment or record an email when initially taking the order. Our business is fast paced, and it slows us down to have to type in an email for every customer. I have many customers who call in an order for us to box up, then pay when they come in(most often with a cc so square still gets their cut). I would love to use the order system in the POS but not having this option keeps us using handwritten orders to be rung up later. 

[Aaron_Product]

Hi @Jenthom08 ,

Thanks for this feedback. We are working on a few feature later this year that should help with your needs: the ability to create a new saved cart as an order which can be fulfilled when you have the inventory to do so and paid when the customer comes to pick it up. We're also working to enable deposits, so you can take a deposit from a customer for pre-orders or custom orders to protect yourself from customers who might not show up to complete the order later. 

[MLackey]

Never remove functionality from an upgraded version. We would have upgraded to the restaurant version but it does not support weights and measures as the old version does. We sell BBQ by the lb and in so have to enter weights at the POS. Can't do it now!!!!!. Can't do it with the new restaurant version so we had to roll back to the old version. That sucks!  was really looking forward to that new version. 

[ryanwanner]

Hey @Tom , @chada , @Aaron_Product and all!

Specific to Order Manager, it is for the most part working in a way that is navigable, but I do have a couple of thoughts...

-Self Serve ordering with Open Tabs: trying to find the associated order when additional orders come in can be problematic, and there really isn't a way to see which order is active. If the new orders showed with the parent/initial order on the line immediately below, indented, color coded to show the new order was a continuation of the original order, it would be easier for the workflow.

-Self serve ordering on KDS. Having SqKDS is great in the fact that it automatically completes the order in OM when you close the ticket on the expediter station KDS, with the OM leaving the order in the Marked Picked Up or Mark Delivered state. For self serve orders, it would be even nicer if the order was automatically cleared from OM completely. My thought here is that in my shop (and I'm assuming the majority of the restaurants out there), as soon as the order is cleared it is heading to the table. At least that's how it works with in person orders. Makes sense that self serve orders follow the same flow, so we know it is delivered as soon as it's cleared from the KDS.

-Minor nit to pick: we have our self serve sections set up as Dining Table xx, Patio Table yy, etc. All we see on the OM is Dining Tabl... for the title of the ticket. Not too easy to find what table the order goes to nor is it easy to easily pull up the table if there are issues. A bigger text field would be nice!

-Overall lagginess. My main order manipulation tablet is an iPad Mini 4. Square, TestFlight, and PhotoStudio are the only apps loaded on it. If I have more than 10 open orders it slows to an absolute crawl.

-I second (third?) the need for the ability to sort by production schedule. Knowing how many of what bakery products I need to make in a day would be so much more helpful than a refrigerator door loaded down with order tickets.

[Aaron_Product]

Hi @ryanwanner ,

We are working on a new view that would display self serve orders along with your in-person orders and also to highlight new orders as they arrive.

[ChefGoldie]

Can you make it so a page can be turned off for ordering while another page stays open? I would like to be able to turn off ordering from my menu but leave my event page open so that people can still make reservations for my events.