Q&A: Using Square as a Freelancer or Service-Based Professional

[Kpay]

Hi Sellers,

On Friday, January 26th from 10am-11am PST, we hosted a Live Q&A on payment best practices for freelancers and service-based professionals. We had the Square Invoices Product Manager, Rohini Pandhi, here to help you make the most out of our invoicing product. Check out all her answers below! 

@rohini leads the product team for Square Invoices. Previous to Square, she worked as a consultant, started her own company, and has experience invoicing her own clients. She understands how important getting paid on time and having a healthy cash flow is for many small businesses.

Customize your Square Invoices to have your professional branding.A couple example questions:

• How can I protect my business from future disputes and non-payments?
• How can I automatically charge my customers for their monthly service fees? 

Thanks for all your questions and cheers!

[ChefNoon]

We second these suggestions!  Spot on to what I was going to post also. Thank you!

[rohini]

Hi @acok - I’ve added my answers to correspond with your numbering 👌  Hope these help you too @ChefNoon

1. We typically suggest that our sellers put their invoice details, like PO numbers, in the notes field of their invoices. Do you need this to be a separate field because you need to search based on that number? How does your business work with POs and Invoices? I’d love to hear more about that process for you.

2. We completely agree about the ability to generate estimates and quotes! We can’t release product ship dates (see #1 as to why), but it’s something that a lot of folks ask for. We’ll be working on it - you can follow along on this thread for progress 🙂

3. Just curious - why is the message field not a good solution for informing customers they can pay by check for your business?

4. This is great feedback. Thanks for sharing! For those of you who may not know: currently business name and logo show on invoices. In an ideal world for you, would all those fields be included in all your invoices (business name, personal name, employee name)? How would you want this to look for your customers?

[musicmegga]

How can I change the headline that shows up on my digital invoices "New Invoice" to something else? 

[rohini]

@musicmegga, thanks for the question! Unfortunately, you can’t currently change the headline on digital invoices so be something other than “New Invoice.” It’s an interesting request though! What would you want to change that headline to? What kind of business do you have?

[thewebtiger]

How about something like the due date? 

"Due nn/nn/nn"

That seems more meaningful than 'new invoice'

[rohini]

@thewebtiger - The due date appears below "New Invoice" currently, but I see what you're saying that it could be more helpful at the top.

Is it important to you that the due date is more prominent or are you more interested in being able to customize that language?

[thewebtiger]

I would prefer the ability to modify that headline. 

Tell me, what is the purpose of that field? How are you intending it to be used? 

[AShapiroStudios]

Thanks for a 90% great product, that keeps getting better. Is there a plan to roll-out decimal billing for hourly-based invoices? Ie, 1.3 hours, etc?  Also, +1 for partial billing (ie deposits, retainer, etc).  Thank You!

[ICS-Sean]

This feature has been an open request for years, and is really a silly feature to overlook.  I've participated in a thread that goes back to 2014 or 2015 that has yet to be satisfied with anything other than "We hear you" or "It's coming in the future."  Please address not only when it will be added, but how this could have been overlooked in the first place.  No billing for weights, partial hours, etc. - Seems like you forgot farmers markets and the vast majority of the service industry with this one.

[MPS_Consulting]

This is the only feature that would take this from being a really good application to a great one (in my humble opinion).  We have various trainers, consultants and associates that bill at different hourly rates.  We have a workaround but it's very cumbersome, confusing and unattractive on the invoice.  A proper way to bill for time, including recording a start time and an end time, would be the propper way to do this.

[rohini]

First off, thank you @AShapiroStudios & @MPS_Consulting for your kind words! 🙂

Second, make sure to check out my response above about partial payments.

Third, we have a lot of big releases planned on our roadmap for this year and support for fractional items is definitely one of those! Fractional items to handle your hourly rates is a request we hear often, and one that we want to address.

@ICS-Sean, Square started with a lot of retail businesses, which never sold a fraction of a t-shirt (for example), which is why the product didn’t launch with this functionality. But as Invoices gets picked up by more freelancers, consultants, and professional services businesses, we know fractional billing is incredibly important.

[ICS-Sean]

For a feature that was originally requested in May 2016, and that Square has been consistently responding with different variations of your answer above, I hope you can see how this answer has lost a bit of credibility. If it was truly a priority, it wouldn't be sitting unsolved for over a year and a half.

[MaddMatt]

While many people are waiting, and have been for a couple years for any kind of substantial response with specific developments being worked on, I have done multiple work around and ended up using multiple processors because I can’t use SQUARE for partial item entries.

I am not selling time though, we sell fuel at a marina.  There are a LOT of convenience stores and gas stations that are independently owned and just need a simple POS.  SQUARE doesn’t allow for me to even enter fuel as a partial item, and each sale is different, and each sale has  decimals.

If SQUARE would fix this one very simple issue, the amount of CC transactions that would be run would more than cover their development cost in probably a week.  The amount of cc billing and fuel sales and hourly Billings for us that are literally waiting for this one issue to be resolved would be quite large.

Are they really working on this, or do we need to stop asking?

[ImmersiveSpaces]

I filed this one under wishful thinking a while back.

[HeatherSweetD]

When will we be able to accept partial payments on invoices? (not installments of a predetermined rate but of custom amount)   

[rohini]

@HeatherSweetD - I answered in more depth about partial payments on the first question so look above to see my response there.

For your specific ask, can you share about your use case for custom amounts for partial payments. Do you want your customers to select how much they want to pay of the total invoice amount? Would they be allowed to pay at any time or would there be due dates? Are all the payments via card or do you take a mix of card, cash, check?

I also got a few questions from @launchpadmedia, @jennifercarr, @BajaTestKitchen, and @mrush23 about having Invoice payment plans and accepting deposits, which would be other use cases we are considering for our partial payments work.

Partial payments cover a broad amount of uses cases, like the need you shared, so hopefully this highlights why it’s a much bigger project that we want to get right!

[HeatherSweetD]

We use invoicing primarily for wedding cake payments.  We want our customer to pay as much or as little as they can over an extended period of time with payment in full reached 2 weeks prior to the event.  We do a mix of all payment types if we need to.  

[Kpay]

Thanks, @HeatherSweetD, that's helpful to understand! Sounds like you're really flexible with your clients and it's helpful to know how we can support you to stay flexible. 😊   @rohini, tagging you so you're aware of this use case! 

[judaht]

Could we get the ability to automatically include a "date of service" in the note field for an item on the invoice based on today's date or another set date?

[rohini]

@judaht, I’d love to better understand the request here. We typically recommend that type of information go in the Notes field of an invoice, but probably wouldn’t set it up to automatically populate, since not all people using invoices would want that. Does manually adding it work for your business? If not, could you provide a bit more details to help me better understand? Thanks!

[phemomenon]

 When I create an invoice and start typing the item, it recognizes the item in my online store and auto completes the name and price.  Does this deduct the item from inventory?   When that item is out of stock will it be automatically removed from my online store?  I hope so because I don't want it to show as available if I already have it on someone's invoice.