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.

[ktaniguchi-sq]

Are you on our beta test for this feature in the restaurant iPad app?  Its running right now as of version 5.90.

[chefkan]

need something to indicate to scroll down to see further items on ticket. ie. 10 items on ticket..how do we know?

recall needs work. when you press recall you should be able to see the last 5 or so tickets that were completed. its kinda hard to find the recalled ticket.

we have 2 kds in kitchen hot and cold. when cold kds completes there ticket and presses complete ,it completes the whole ticket on both kds ipads.

[ElTaquero]

You may have your cold KDS set up as “Expeditor”. Switch it over to “Prep” and your issue should be resolved 😁

[PortaDiRoma]

Being able to split an item across multiple tickets would be very helpful ie.) a table wants separate checks but they shared a bottle of wine so we need to put 1/3 of the bottle on each check 

[buffalojoes]

Yes to this! So many people would like to split some of our larger menu items!!

[MJAYS]

KDS Feedback

1. Be able to filter the categories which are sent to the KDS so only the items which need to be completed in the kitchen appear. (For our business, when a customer places an order at the till & also purchases retail products we don't need these products sending through to the KDS, it can be very confusing on big orders filtering through what items need to be made in the kitchen)

2. The ability to print of individual sticky labels from the KDS to stick onto items. This could be triggered manually or automatically.

Restaurants Feedback

1. Be able to use Loyalty on the Square Restaurants app when using the register. 

[dkhtodd]

Yes, yes. 1000 times yes on both KDS Feedback items!!!!

[makedonas]

There is already a way to filter items/categories on Square KDS. And you can do it for each screen separately. 

[Ginkhao]

Yes

[Ninjarita]

You can already do this on KDS, the categories have to be set for each item.

[ninosbakery]

When a ticket is edited it reprints to the kitchen with no indication that it is a edited ticket. Would be nice to have some sort of indicator that shows something was changed.

[makedonas]

Yes!

[allwhowander]

We do not currently use KDS or restaurants. Here's my feedback as to why FWIW!

-Overall, I just don't see enough relevant features to pay for the Kitchen POS compared to the regular POS. If some of these features were addressed, it would definitely make me switch.

-We are a counter service bar, and give a customer a number flag to run the food to their table. I think implementing a simple feature to enter this number on the kitchen printout would be a huge win for us, but as of right now there is no difference between manually entering a note on either regular Square POS or Restaurants. This could be so much cleaner and accurate if it were integrated into Square.

-Pre-auth credit cards. Please. Please. Please.

-Real time inventory from in-house open tabs so that people can't purchase the same product online at the same time it's being consumed in house. 

-I've tried to get my team to use KDS screens on and off again for a year now, but they prefer tickets. I've never run kitchen so I don't know personally know why, but they all agree the KDS screen is confusing and creates more problems than the old paper ticket method. 

Thanks for listening to our feedback!

[desertbloomco]

I would like for the conversational modifiers to be more useable. What I mean by that is for when you press "NO" it doesn't add a charge, or when you press the "SUB" button, it doesn't add a charge as well. If I'm removing a flavor, why should we be charging a customer for that. Same goes for substituting. We're just switching out one item for another. That doesn't change the price. 

Either that, or provide us the option to edit the conversational modifiers ourselves. 

[ElTaquero]

Mayyyybeeee now they’ll add the edit conversational mod option. Fingers crossed! 

[kmacmmurchy]

Square POS Wish List

Preface

We’re Brewed Awakening coffee house (est. 2011 bakery/coffee houses) with 5 shops located in Regina Canada. We’re a Quick service coffee house. We have a commissary bakery/kitchen that preps fresh and trucks our food orders to each store daily. Pre-pandemic we usually gross around 2.5-3 million/year in sales. We like that Square is evolving and will listen to our feedback. We are still using a hybrid system of “Restaurant Manager” and Square POS because of Gift Cards and compatibility.

A Square MUST FIX

Terminal tied to iPad wirelessly needs to accommodate “Split Payment” otherwise the solution is useless if you use Square gift cards.

Drive-Thru Solution

Need a solid solution for high paced drive thru coffee, specifically something you can hand the customer to take payment which will handle loyalty as well as split payment. Terminal on it’s own is too cumbersome for data entry in a high paced environment. iPad —> Terminal is great but as mentioned no “Split Payment”.  Perhaps a solid and safe way to hand customer the Square Register pin pad?

Reports - (Automation Please!)

Although the information is mostly all there I find some reporting could be less cumbersome and some email automation would be far more helpful and time saving. A PDF option as well as the current CSV would be nice and the ability to send to multiple emails.

Example: 

With our current antique RM POS I can Automate the system to send month end sales (via email) from each of our locations to our Bookkeeper so he can begin month end. This includes Tax reports, Sales by Category and POS user fees.

Labour reports automated with the ability to set “cut-off date” (2 week in our case) for payroll. —> on the cutoff date the capability to email a CSV/or PDF report to bookkeeper. Saving time by not having to run each store manually.

Schedule any daily custom report via email to multiple email addresses. Another example would be our commissary kitchen receiving our food category sales so they know how much was sold the previous day and how much to prep for the next day.

End of day SALES/CASH DRAWER REPORT

Unless I’m mistaken it would be nice to see the electronic “Tips” a negative value so that it was automatically subtracted from the “Net Cash” easier math for the cash out clerk

GIFT CARD SALES

I may be confused on this one, but in our old system the sales report would record a new activation as a negative value ie. (-$20) and when redemptions come in they count as a positive sale in whatever amount is redeemed . Maybe I’m missing something here if someone could explain. 

A way to do a Global Price increase?

Copy POS layout to different store iPad?

A way to copy the POS layout (not Square for Restaurants) between locations? My 5 cafes are all on different bank accounts so different location login under the same main Square account. I'd like to do this so it's the same for all staff. 

LOYALTY PROGRAM IS TOO EXPENSIVE

It would cost $100/month to discount my product selling $3 coffees it seems that doesn’t really pay. I’d spend what I made up for in loyalty. Don’t like to be nickel and dimed.

[kmacmmurchy]

Meant to mention Servers seem slow to login often so maybe an upgrade to servers for speed?

Also, Weebly is weak at best. I assume it will be a priority. It seems slow and not very robust, say compared to Shopify.

[twinlakescreame]

Agree, loyalty program is highly overpriced. 

[makedonas]

- KDS. There are still visual glitches where the names are listed on tickets. It looks garbled and mixed with numbers. It may have to do with what size font we pick (small, med, large). Needs to be fixed. 
- KDS. adding the red color for modifiers is a great first step. Next? Adding multiple colors and letting us choose which colors go to which modifiers. Example: Meat modifiers can be one color to akert our grill cook. 
- KDS. Delivery Notes MUST be taken off the screen! It’s a total waste of valuable space! They can be left on printed tickets, where they belong. 
- Square/Restaurants. Assigning/moving a table from one server to another, should not be a manager level request. 
there should just be some sort of acceptance/confirmation from the receiving server for the table/order to be transferred over. 
- Square/Restaurants. I currently use the Notes section of an item to list a drink recipe for that Cocktail item. It would be very helpful if an employee could print this quickly. (Even a separate section than the item/ingredient notes would be good too)  

- Square/Restaurants. How many years now, still waiting for the industry standard of being able to split an appetizer between 2 split tickets lol
- Square/Restaurants. Full Square Register functionality for Restaurants? This is the reason that I still havent purchased Square Register yet, even tho I really want to. Square Terminal too! (table layout, seat numbers)

[HookedonColfax]

Hi! I’m very worried about the tip pool change in April 2022-it just will not work for our little coffee shop. Is this change still planned?

[lgmbts]

We are a coffee shop as well, and shared your same concern.  If you go to "Shifts", tap on "Settings", and scroll down to "Tips", I think you may find that it addresses your concern.  The third option is "pool by shift", which is, as far as I understand,  the historical way that tips have been distributed.  Hope this puts your concern to rest!