Square for Restaurants & KDS: What features or improvements would you like to see in 2022?

[rajatdeva]

Hello Seller Community 👋🏼 My name is Rajat and I work on the Square for Restaurants team here at Square.

As we look into next year, we’re hoping to hear from you all on what you would like to see in development for our Square for Restaurants product, which include the Restaurants Point of Sale app and Square KDS!  

                                                    

 

 

These can be suggestions that have already been mentioned on the Square for Restaurants feature request board, but that you’ve identified as your top feature request that you’d like to see developed in 2022! Think of it as a Square for Restaurants and/or a KDS ‘wish list’. 

Please reply below with some feature suggestions or product improvements that you’d like to see. Your comments will be recorded and reviewed by our Square for Restaurants Product Team. 

 

[lgmbts · Accepted solution]

A more robust way to manage inventory, on the fly.  We "retire" inventory and produce new inventory all day, every day.  Being able to click on a tracked item in the POS and adjust inventory on the fly would be HUGE!  Having to stop using the register as a register, log into the dashboard, and adjust inventory is clunky, inefficient, and not possible in the middle of a rush.

[unclegspizza]

This is more for square online but we would like to see the ability to schedule orders without taking payment via square terminal. ALSO more importantly, the ability to select specific dates for hours of operation, instead of only blackout dates. We are a food truck and change our schedule weekly, so a repeating weekly schedule does not work as people try to place orders for the next week where our hours and location will be different. 

[DSander]

It would be nice to have the sales on the phone app be live. It's frustrating that you cannot see sales until the end of day.

It would also be nice to have the sales attached to the actual service time and not when the check is closed. This is for the restaurant app. When determining labor needs, having the sales only show up on the report time when the check is closed doesn't show you when the business level happened. In a restaurant people hang out often long after eating etc. We close at 9:00pm and it iften shows a bulk of the sales after nine when in reality they happened between 7:30-8:30

[lgmbts · Accepted solution]

A more robust way to manage inventory, on the fly.  We "retire" inventory and produce new inventory all day, every day.  Being able to click on a tracked item in the POS and adjust inventory on the fly would be HUGE!  Having to stop using the register as a register, log into the dashboard, and adjust inventory is clunky, inefficient, and not possible in the middle of a rush.

[oldedixie]

A better inventory tracking approach has long been an opportunity for our food truck as well. We would love to see some type of alert that pops up on the POS for our cashier telling them that a particular item is close to running out of stock or has run out of stock. A pop-up alert stating a threshold set by the business would allow us to stop and analyze our inventory count to see if we are indeed close to running out of stock. Often times as it is now, we tend to sell through product we sold out of due to long lines and large orders. This, of course, results in having to backpedal on orders already placed and refund customers or see if they’d like something else that is similar in price which results in slowing up the line.

[Anthem]

Agreed, something that worked as a pop-up or slide screen (thinking customer profile or feedback screen that slides in on dashboard) would be an option without leaving the register actions taking place at the time. 

[sbrockz]

We would love to have the swipe cards for managers instead of typing in the code

Thank you

[sbrockz]

Pricing modifiers 

For example for Add Spinach it is $5 but when we Sub Spinach it is $2.50

[sbrockz]

The ability for the Restaurant to disable the notes option on the items.

So this way Staff is not free to type the notes. This creates a huge confusion for the kitchen.

Thank you

[CityOfBeer]

Better inventory management for draft beer etc. and the ability to track product margin and include it in the net sales.

[clkirk]

• End of day reports to have credit card tips separated out from card sales 
• A way to copy the POS layout (not Square for Restaurants) between devices. I keep multiple menus for my food truck depending on the location that I am serving for that day. On some devices the additional menus will display on others they do not. To time consuming to update each one.
• Upgrade Restaurant POS to be as good as Square POS but with added restaurant features
• Restaurant POS app for Android tablets
• Square KDS for Android. 
• Ability to automatically text an online/QR customer when their order is ready for pickup when it marked complete on the KDS
• Option for orders to be displayed on the KDS as they are being entered and not waiting for them to complete check out. This would greatly speed up our food truck
• Ability to Separate Multiple Orders on One Ticket/Create Combos or dinners – on the POS and online orders to indicate what is to be plated together.
• version geared toward food trucks
• This is more for square online: The ability to select specific dates and hours of operation, instead of only blackout dates. We are a food truck and change our schedule weekly, so a repeating weekly schedule does not work as people try to place orders for the next week where our hours and location will be different. 
• Ability to reset inventory each day/zeroed out at the end of day

[clkirk]

Wrote this a few months ago and all feature requests are still needed.

[athistle]

Adding New Items - Point of Sale Behavior- Turn the "Automatically Add To Check" option off instead of preset to on.

Gets me every time. 

[Sam_400º]

Hey @rajatdeva - was just looking out the group to pop in a FR & found this so perfect! 

I'd LOVE to see a customer facing screen for the KDS.

With social distancing looking like it's here to stay it would be really useful to have an iPad (or external display hooked up to counter KDS iPad as a presenter screen) that shows orders 'in progress' & those marked as ready for collection. 

I hate to say it, but a little bit like McDonalds has 😳

[hatchkitchen]

Need a way to make modifiers "out of stock" on KDS.  Our menu gives customers the option to add additions such as avocado, tomatoes.  If we are out of the add-ons, we need a way to mark just the modifiers out of stock without affecting the rest of the menu item.

[JeffreyBrown · Accepted solution]

Thank you KDS & SFR Teams!

we love the Square ecosystem. 

ONE BIG REQUEST…….day by day inventory. That’s it. One big ask. 

We're IZOLA bakery. We bake all day and serve everything hot from the oven to our customers.  We receive about 55% of our orders via online ordering (both in advance + same day), and 45% are traditional "walk ins" 

Here is an example of how we (and I think many other users) might use "day by day" inventory. Let's pretend to plan an OLIVE SOURDOUGH special for next week. We take orders simultaneously from

1. online 
   1. same day
   2. future fulfillment
2. POS (walk in) for immediate fulfilment from the counter. 

So what we want to be able to do is enter how many total loaves we have available for sale each day. And for example when the 20 loaves of olive bread are sold for Monday. (by a combination online and via POS) Customers can still order for Tuesday or any future date which has inventory set. (and it would be nice for customers to be able to sign up for email/text notifications when an item comes back in stock)

So for example we'd set the daily inventory as follows: 

Mon - closed

Tuesday - 20 loaves

Weds - 16 loaves

Thursday 25 loaves

Friday 50 loaves. 

Saturday 80 loaves

Sunday 90 loaves

 I think it would be helpful across a wide range of businesses (flower shops, restaurants, breweries, coffee bars, anyone who want to have set number of a certain item available each day) that want to allow online ordering.   And from a wider perspective, I believe "DAY BY DAY INVENTORY" will help our small businesses better serve customers who have quickly become accustomed to easy online ordering via amazon, chipotle, etc. 

Thoughts? 

[OurCupCakery]

Yes, we would love to have this too. 

[Tamyra_Paunchy]

Oooh!! I agree with Jeffrey. Day-to-day inventory would be amazing. We are a wholesale bottled beverage manufacturer but we allow local customers to order just a few bottles via Door Dash/GrubHub. We have two fridges in the lobby area of our space dedicated to pickup orders for this purpose and right now since we don't know of a better way, we do inventory on those every morning and evening, but we keep those inventory sheets on paper, taped to the sides of the coolers. Would be fantastic if we could put that info into Square directly somehow! 

[rendelven]

Yes, something like this would be great.

And unless I've missed it somehow:

Having the inventory in it's own separate database/list so one INVENTORY item can be linked to multiple MENU and/or MODIFIER items. This would allow multiple menu items to decrease the stock count of an individual inventory item count. 

Right now if I use 1 product on 3 meals it doesn't accurately track it the other 2 meals if 1 is sold.

[WineCurmudgeon]

I know these have been mentioned before, by me for sure. But you asked for here you go.

1. KDS has to handle open orders (tabs). I'd love to use KDS but I can not as long as it only handles paid orders.

2. Bundled items. Create a bundle from existing items. The bundle has its own price and each item is properly relieved from inventory.

3. Add on with a negative price. I sell bottled beverages for in house and take out. There is a $2 add for in house consumption. Customers don't really like that. What I want and what the customers would like is a -$2 discount on all take home bottles.

[Gary55]

Hi, Forgive me if this already exists. I think something really useful for our restaurant, would be a consumer side app/tech they can add to their phone with the purpose of linking to their square profile, gift cards, debit & credit cards, receipts etc.Im thinking a cross between a modern banking app(starling/revolut) & something like paypal (I don't care for PayPal and don't think they do it as well as Square could, but people understand these banking apps). Our restaurant saw a massive uptake in online purchases during lockdown but this is dropping fast despite improvements, In Hospitality our guests are choosing to order in person for two main reasons that are actually related. 1. People go out to eat because it is social. SO being able to create an order TOGETHER online on one device then split the bill to pay separately using their Square profiles would be a killer innovation. 2nd reason is it is currently quicker & easier for the guest to just give their order to a person & Tap their card to pay (upto £100 contactless now) than it is to go through the existing checkout process.  We are really pushing online ordering as we see the benefits blended service can offer. But I am currently unable to get customers to complete checkout with square online when onsite.

[BeChewzy]

Good morning Gary,

Unfortunately this is something that does not currently exist but something I have been thinking of working on while I am already creating the ability to do group ordering. The only issue I have run into with what you are mentioning is that there is currently no api connection for "open orders" in the POS, so some workarounds would have to be made to get those features as you described. Question for you is what integrations would be a must haves in your current square POS environment (Table Management, KDS, Discounts) that you would need to give these features to your customers?