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

[Tom]

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.

This event was 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 we hosted a Q&A to address questions and make sure your experiences are documented with the Reporting team's 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?

[TrayceAnn]

Yes! I so agree with this! Sometimes in-house gift cards are labeled as "other" sometimes they come up as "gift cards".  It would be much more helpful to see exactly what payment types are coming in. Payment method reporting definitely needs improvement. 

We are also and event venue that takes advance deposits and trying to match revenue with the transactions and deposits is a bit of a nightmare!

[thegrapevine]

Yes! We are a clothing store. We have to decipher what other means at the end of each day, as checks are in there also!

[annakepler]

We are about to launch an improvement that will separate checks from other transactions. It should be available to you in a month!

[annakepler]

Thank you for your feedback @ChambersSF !
We will take a look into why Checks not showing up in Transactions Report anymore.

We are currently looking into offering the ability to break down payment reports by different custom categories. Your example with various categories of Other payments is a perfect example. If you would be open for an interview, we would love to understand the use case further.

[ChambersSF]

Where/how do we sign up to attend the webinar?

[Tom]

Hi @ChambersSF, thanks for checking in! This Q&A will be via text only within this thread. If you have any questions or feedback, please do drop them into a reply. The Reporting team will get back to you with their reply next Wednesday.

P.S. We are looking into more live event types. Stay tuned for updates and thanks for your patience.

[EgyptianTheatre]

We are a performance venue and every week/month/year is different.  So all the auto comparisons to previous Friday's or months, etc. is not helpful to us.  It would be helpful to categorize/tag a day (concert, comedy, dance, wedding, etc.) and compare that way.

With lots of patrons, very few POS, and short amounts of time to serve....ticket times are a big deal.  It would be helpful to track per cashier and/or collectively what our average transaction time is, # of transactions per minute, # of items or gross sales per minute.

All of our items are priced at even dollars or $0.50 increments (we don't add the tax through Square) but occasionally in our reports the totals for different categories will show totals ending in odd amounts like .37 and .58 which impossible.  This has been happening for over a year and we can't figure out what is causing that.

When there is a split payment, it would be helpful for each split amount to show up in the correct payment category so we can reconcile.  I realize that gets hard to do when figuring out how to apply the different item categories to the different payment categories.

Lastly, on the backend on a desktop, it would be really helpful to run a report on tickets (tabs) that are currently in the system but haven't been paid for yet.  That way we could pull up and see tickets easily from a desktop and pull a report of what all the current tickets total and total by category and items.

[annakepler]

Thank you for the great insight into your needs for reporting @EgyptianTheatre !
Your comparison approach definitely makes sense. We are working to introduce the reporting by custom categories. It will allow you to categorize your sales accordingly and use them throughout reports.

average transaction time is, # of transactions per minute, # of items or gross sales per minute are definitely valuable metrics, I am going to add it to the feature list and discuss with the team about adding it.

Odd amounts in the totals. Can I ask what reports you can see it in? It is hard to answer without looking at the data, but this can happen when fees are included in the totals. Discounts can affect it as well.

You are correct, splitting items to properly show up under the correct payment category is tricky, but I will take it back to the team and see what we can do.

A report on open tickets is something available today on POS. Can I ask how it would help you to have this report in the backend on desktop? I assume you have multiple POS and want a single view across all?

[EgyptianTheatre]

We have discovered that the odd amounts in totals is because of discounts.  We set up the discounts as a dollar amount off and it randomly spreads that discount across the categories in the transaction.  We looked at it again just the other day and tried attributing the discount to the specific item but found that it automatically applies the discount when you select that item, we don't want that.

The scenario is, someone may have a coupon for $2 off a small popcorn.  So we set up a discount that says $2 off popcorn.  We ring up a small popcorn at $4 and add the discount of $2 off a small popcorn.  The total works perfectly at the POS.  However, if that transaction also included say a beer (different item category), the system randomly spreads the $2 discount across the popcorn and beer resulting in a report with odd amounts of sales in the different categories/items.

Open tickets report, we have 6 POS.  So as management, it would be nice to pull up at my desk to see what current ticket "sales" are as the current sales report doesn't reflect everything since the tickets haven't been closed out.  On a side note, it would be amazing to be able to pre slide/chip a credit card and attach it to the ticket instead of holding on to the cards to run at the end of the event.

Thanks for actually looking at these comments and responding!!!

[GourmetOnWheels]

In the items Sales Detailed CSV reports

There are so many columns that are not needed

Transaction ID

Payment ID

Customer ID

Customer Reference ID

René

[annakepler]

Thank you for sharing @GourmetOnWheels ! We are looking to offer customized CSV export. But until then, you can delete the columns once uploaded into your system for processing.
May I ask how frequently you download the reports? And how do you use it after downloading it?

[KrisTM]

For sales estimates and scheduling it would be helpful to look at sales trends for any series of days - weekends together, Mondays together, etc. with hourly sales charted. It might also be helpful to be able to break hourly sales down by half hour periods or quarter hours to see where sales are actually occurring.

[annakepler]

These are great data points @KrisTM !
We will definitely put them on the feature list. Thank you so much for sharing.
Can I ask how you would use the half and quarter hour sales?

[KrisTM]

For scheduling staff. If there's a trend of sales dropping off considerably at, say, 9:30 PM, vs the entire 9 PM hour, it would help with scheduling people to work through the hour or only for the first half.

[gingerlywax]

I would love an accurate labor to sales report. As of now it only shows employees hourly wage. It would be helpful and accurate if it showed their commission as well. 

[annakepler]

Thank you for your message! I will pass this improvement recommendation to the team.

[JDAggie]

If the Items Summary report could include 2 additional features, Square would save HOURS of time per week for me!  If the Items Sales Summary could include 1) fees taken out with net amount received and 2) refunds (it shows discounts but not when items are refunded/returned) -- those two things would be GREAT.

I separate my Square deposit into QuickBooks by item category. Without knowing the fees and if items were returned/refunded, I can not accurately separate my deposits. I have to estimate fees toward each category, and I have to go to the Transaction report to find the refunds. 

Thanks for asking!

[ToniG]

Yessss all of this!

[chada]

Thank you for feedback. Can you help me understand why fees at the Items-level is required for you? We have Total Collected in the Sales Summary which is Fees + Net Sales.

 I will take your recommendations to the team to see how we can improve your experience.

[JDAggie]

Fees at the Category level would be helpful because one person might be items from 2 different categories... For example, they buy a t-shirt (merchandise, say $20) and a ticket to an event (event, say $75).  When I put this deposit into Quickbooks, I split the amount into categories to track what is paid for Merchandise and what is paid for Events.

Currently, I have to estimate the fees for each of these to get a "ball park" amount in Quickbooks.

But if the Sales Summary could say:

20 t-shirts..... Gross $400. .....Net $375..... Fees $25

100 Events....Gross $7500..... Net $7300...Fees $200

Then I know exactly how to categorize this income in Quickbooks.    Currently, I have to do an individual transaction summary, then sort by product, then group like products, add those together, etc. to get the info I need to correctly put into Quickbooks.

[beachbird92]

In the sales report,  would be possible to list the  items by alphabet instead of by sales gross or count? That would be so much easier for me.

And in the checkout library, I would love to have more control over the top tabs, I never use them and they are always in the way.

Thank you,

beachbird92