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

[tranguyen]

Happy New Year, Seller Community! ✨

Effective and reliable reporting is crucial for the smooth operation of any business, and we recognise 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!

[charproc]

This would be really useful for us as well

[johnsheard]

Just to be clear - we would like the report to show the number of appointments that were booked in a day - not the number of appointments for that day

[annakepler]

Thanks for the feedback @johnsheard !
We’re going to be working more on various appointment reports throughout the year so it's helpful to hear exactly which ones people are looking for and what things people want to be able to do. I’ll definitely take this back to the team.

[Nethcon]

When I 'Export' the 'Sales Summary' under the heading of 'Reports', whether it be for a single day or a week, some of the items visible on the screen do not appear in the extract, in particular under 'payments' the items 'Cash' and 'Card'.  These are items that I then need to extract manually and add to the report having them as part of the extract would be very useful.

Similarly when I 'Export' the 'Item Sales', 'Summary CSV' under the heading of 'Reports' the column headed 'Units sold' on screen does not appear in the download, again this is something that I then have to do manually as I require this information for my business. Again having this column in the report would save me considerable time.

Regards

Charles Rapley

[annakepler]

Hi @Nethcon !
This is certainly a miss on our side. I will take it back to our team and make sure we get more consistency in the behavior for the exported reports. 

[Nethcon]

I have another question, regarding 'Customers', one of the items entered when 'creating' a customer is the 'Group' or 'Groups' to which they belong yet this does not appear as an item that can be selected for the on screen detail against the list of customers and similarly it does not appear in the CSV when a carrying out an 'Export customers' report.

Regards

Charles Rapley

[annakepler]

Hi @Nethcon , appreciate you sharing this feedback. Unfortunately this data is currently unavailable in these views. While I don’t have any concrete details to share right now, improving the accessibility and flexibility of customer data is top of mind for the team, and something we’re actively working to improve.

[Nethcon]

Thank you, I look forward to any further developments

[dvstar]

Might Square start having its own in-house accounting system (like Xero) that we can run the business accounts on?

[annakepler]

This is not something we consider at the moment. 

[dmhearth]

We would like to see a report on delivery. Currently we have no way of seeing how much sales came from delivery vs click and collect vs apps vs dine in, in this day and age of multiple streams we need to see the trends and where we need to focus. Strangely each month there is an auto report from square that lands in our inbox to tell us about our own delivery but nothing we can access and no way of seeing the trend. Everything is lumped into ‘other’ makes conversations with the accountant very difficult as we don’t really know which revenue stream

is growing or declining. We’d also love to see where our deliveries are coming from by post code to allow us to target areas with advertisements. Finally we use Square appointment’s for table booking, this was a temporary system for Covid you said you would be improving or launching a new app for this for restaurants but in two years there has been no developments and we still have a system where a staff member is a table. It’s clunky and has a lot of improvements that could be made. We’d love to see better flexibility on times that a table can be booked by the customer so they can book at 15 minutes, 30 minutes or 45 minutes on the hour. Some customers are specifically looking to start their booking from 6:45 and not 7 as an example. We’d then love a report where we can see trends, cancellations, no shows, avg table spend, block tables for functions and many more basic features. 

[phillipsrw]

Can I just say how fantastic the Square reporting function is. Very well thought through, UI well presented clear, concise and very flexible. 

The only thing which would help us is on the sales summary can you report how much will actually be paid in to the account so we can reconcile with the bank. On a daily basis we have to calculate the amount being deposited in to the account ie card payments minus fees. No biggy but it's a little daily task

Thank you 😊 

[annakepler]

Thanks for your feedback and thank you for your note @phillipsrw ! I understand it would be easier for you to reconsider bank transfers with the card payments minus transaction fees. We will take note of that!

[KMCSouthampton]

Hi there,

I would like to be able to pull off a Square Report that shows me all the customers has bought a particular product please this would be very useful to me.

Thanks

[ThePencilCase]

I agree.  As well as reports at an individual product level, it would be really helpful to see which customers have bought from a particular category.

[BarrelandStill]

Hi!

When I signed up for Square last year, I was told that a Statement Report feature was planned for Q3 2022. There's been no sign of it since. It seems like a very strange omission in an invoicing app that I can't automatically send a monthly Statement to my customers.

Not a report feature, but the other confusing omission is the inability to raise a credit note for use when customers pay using non Square methods.

On the positive side, I absolutely love Square for Retail, Invoices and Register! It's revolutionised my business, saved me enormous amounts of time and improved my credit control. It's a great suite of products and hardware! 

Thanks

Dom

[amjessey]

Hi @BarrelandStill 

We, too, would like to see a statement report that we can use for internal reporting as well as a version made for sharing with the client. I have posted a request for statements a few times before (and associated functionality), the most recent being here.

An obvious channel for account statements to be shared with the client is Projects, and it would be good to know what plans Square has for statements and Projects as the latter seems it has a long way to go before it is on par with other parts of Square.

Thank you. 

[amjessey]

We find some of the reporting very useful, however, here are some things we think would make it better:

1. Ability to drill into each and every metric in all reports. This is currently only available on a few reports and usually only one level down. Expanding context in reporting is important, not only the number sold but to who, when and how this compares to other periods and also to targets (top line and sell-throughs), as well as comparing to other products. Reports should allow for this and drilling into is a means to achieving this.
2. Related to the above, centralised, universal comparison reporting across all apps (e.g. Invoices, POS, Online, Marketing, Customer Directory and Appointments) is necessary;  
3. Ability to build own custom reports (utilising metrics in the ways described above) and save these on a Reports Dashboard;
4. A report to project revenue and compare this to projected costs (purchase orders that have yet to be received); 
5. All the reports which are delivered daily, weekly, monthly and annually via email to be saved and viewable in Dashboard;
6. Ability to have Item sub-categories and report on those; 
7. Ability to hide and add columns, and hide the main menu (far left). 

Thank you

[ThePencilCase]

I would really appreciate the following reports please:

1) Aggregated product categories - my single biggest frustration with Square!  Please, please, please can you make it possible to have sub-categories, both in the item menu and in reports.  

I have 4 main product categories in my business (school uniform, stationery, cards & balloons and gifts).  Within each there are a variety of sub-categories.  These are what I have set up on Square.  

Eg in School Uniform I have 12 different schools which are all set up as separate categories on Square so I can see how they each perform.  But I really want to be able to aggregate them up into one master category "School Uniform".  In Stationery, the Square categories are pens, pencils, notebooks, pencil cases etc etc.  In Cards & Balloons they are birthday cards, occasion cards, seasonal cards, large number balloons, age balloons, occasion balloons, banners, badges, etc etc.  

At the moment I have to export the category report and then in Excel manually create master categories to which I assign all the Square categories as sub-categories, which takes ages to do.

2) net sales (not gross) by month by category.  I can get net sales for a whole year by category, but not split it down by month/week.

3) which customers buy which categories

4) customer spend in a specified time period - at the moment all I can see is how much all our customers have spent in total since we started using Square.  I need to be able to see how much they spend annually / monthly and on what categories, so we can understand and compare the changes over time.

5) sales this year v the same time period last year

6) when I export payment types by day, nothing is in the .csv file.  I have to export it by week.

[ShotShak]

I would like to search total transactions between a date and time period on the app. Would save a lot of time locating sales on a specific date in more detail than the report.

Thanks

Shakila

[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. 🙏🏻