2018 Wish List (Updated)

[ImmersiveSpaces]

I have just completed my first full year with Square for my business. It's been great in a lot of ways, lacking in a few others... I thought to start the new year I would give you all my "Wish List" for features that I would love to see implemented, and open up the thread for anyone else who had items they would like to see added in 2018.

1/24/18: Updated to add Invoice Backdating

PARTIAL INVOICE PAYMENTS - Probably one of the biggest lacking features that we have run into. It seems like a basic function, so I'm surprised that Square hasn't made this a higher priority, especially with all the requests for this feature I have seen in the community. Every basic invoicing system out there has this ability. (Sadly, we use PayPal for any invoice transactions that require partial payments (which is most of them) since their system has had this ability since day one. Would love to have this all under the Square umbrella.)

BACKDATING OF INVOICES - Being able to enter old invoices or invoices that were created in other systems and date them for when they where actually created would be extremely helpful and would ensure that the sales reporting in Square was accurate. Right now you can't enter invoices into the system and date them for anything in the past. We run into this a lot and it creates a headache when trying to get sales reporting for a month when some invoices should actually be recorded in the month prior, but for any number of reasons, were not able to be and Square does not provide a way to correct invoice dating.

STORE CREDIT - Again a feature that is talked about a lot in the community. As a service business, I often reward customers for referrals with store credit. Because of the nature of our business, it is also impractical to issue a gift/egift card. (Besides, "gifts" are not the same as credit and should be listed separately on reports.) Being able to issue a credit to a customer that can be applied to direct sales or invoices would save me from having to keep a separate journal of credits for customers. Again, this is an extremely basic retail function, so I'm surprised that this hasn't already been implemented.

CUSTOMER NAME ON REGISTER RECEIPTS - Seems trivial, but having known customer's names print on receipts without having to add it in the notes every time, even if it's just first initial, last name, would be extremely helpful.

REGISTER PRINTED ANNUAL REPORTS BY CUSTOMER - It would be FANTASTIC if a report can be run and printed from the register receipt printer that shows a summary of all of a customer's transactions for that year from every payment method. Some customers use multiple cards, so aggregating this at the register is extremely valuable information for us when looking for past transactions, generating quick reports for customers for tax purposes, or considering discounts based on a customer's sales history.

ABILITY TO DELETE OR HIDE TRANSACTIONS FROM REPORTING - As mentioned in the comment below, when a transaction is refunded, or if a mistake was made in ringing the transaction, the amount of the sale remains in the sales reports. So for example, if someone makes a mistake and rings a transaction for the wrong amount and closes the sale, from that day forward, your sales records will forever be off by the erroneous sales total no matter what. Have 2 or 3 erroneous transactions, and your Square reports are pretty much useless.

[katieand]

Hi @ImmersiveSpaces - First of all, congrats on your first year with Square 🎉! 

Thank you for sharing this detailed, helpful feedback. We are constantly learning from Sellers like you so thanks for taking the time to write this feedback all out. May I ask which Square products you are using so I can share all of this with the appropriate Product Managers? 

I completely understand the pain points that you've expressed here, and you're right, there are a lot of other sellers who feel these too. We too take our customer feedback seriously and getting posts like the one you shared allows us to more accurately represent the voice of our Sellers to our product teams.

Also, I love that you're thinking of how to simplify things for your customer and reward them more. 

What type of business do you have?  Are any of these features more important to you than others (I noticed the partial invoice payments is up there for you.)?

[ImmersiveSpaces]

We use the Square Stand, the reader for contactless and chip, and a USB Printer.

My company is a property imaging service... we produce virtual reality tours, photography, and marketing items for real estate brokers and agents.

If I was to put these features in order, they would probably be Store Credit first, only because I have another option for the partial invoice payments with the invoice feature in PayPal that is serving my needs right now. (I would say 80-90% of our business is done with invoicing and accepting partial payments, so most of our transactions are being done with PayPal.)

That being said, rewarding our customers with store credits for referrals is a big driver of new customers, and it is also useful when dealing with customer service issues, so it is more valuable to me than the partial payments right now.

After those two, I would go customer annual reports and finally customer name on receipts. Like I said above, partial invoice payments and store credits are pretty basic retail functions in most POS systems. I see some of the requests for these features go back years on the community forums, so I hope we'll see them sooner than later.

[katieand]

Thanks for elaborating @ImmersiveSpaces! I understand how important rewarding customers is to growing business. I'm going to dig into this a bit more from our side and get back to you with any updates we have. 

[creatorsgame]

The Printed Customer Annual Reports would be an incredible feature for non-profits. We manually generate these every year for our donors. It's incredibly time consuming. Pulling up a customer in register and printing a transaction report for a date range with the receipt printer would save hours of labor.

[katieand]

Thanks for adding your voice, @creatorsgame! Great to get the non-profit perspective 👌

[BridgeChurch]

I'd add my support for that as well. As a church, this is the most frustrating thing about the square system. Manually generating these reports should take seconds, but instead, we have to go through each donor, one at a time, and every transaction. It takes us several days to get through it every year. Our old POS system we could just select the donor and a date range and a tally receipt would print with all of their transactions across all payment methods. We finished our annual reporting in about an hour back because of this ability. We have used many different POS systems over the years, and square is the only one that has this deficiency. 

[paravelmedia]

What's really frustrating about his is that they already have this feature largely completed. In register, when you go into the customer tab, you can view activity for individual customers under their profiles, but you can't print it or select a date range.

[BridgeChurch]

I'd like to add one more feature that is talked about ALL THE TIME on these boards...

THE ABILITY TO DELETE TRANSACTIONS

Sometimes accidents happen, we shouldn't have to perminently have our reports reflect eronious totals because a transaction cannot be deleted. This doesn't apply to Credit Card transactions, but for example we had someone ring in a $100 cash transaction for an item, they accidentally typed in $1000 and cashed out the order before she realized... we "refunded" the transactions, but now our sales report perminently show the extra $1000 that never really happened. Over the past year we have had several thousand dollars in transactions that needed to be voided, but instead where refunded because of the limitation in this system. As a result, when we run our annual reports, we have to note on them to subtract the total amount of the eronious transactions from the entire year (which we manually total every week) to get the actual totals. It's silly that you can't delete, or at the very least exlude transactions from reporting. It makes a totall mess of the sales reports and pretty much renders them useless. We keep a separate spreadsheet of all of our "real" transactions now just because it was getting too frustrating trying to figure out which transactions should not be included in sales totals.

[paravelmedia]

I gave up the hope of them implementing most of these features years ago. Many of these requests have been around forever. After these important features being ignored for so long, I think we can assume they are not a priority for Square.

[ellasolive]

Hello, I am new to the forum, but wanted to see if I can get some advice. I am a square user, but used it last year to accept mobile payments only. I am now opening a retail store, gourmet food/gifts, and looking to select the right POS. Square has mixed reviews one on hand, on the other it does have a complete set of feature (from advanced inventory to payroll). My other option is Shopkeep or Lightspeed. I am also looking at getting the Register vs, stand. I really appreciate if you can share your views on this

[Tom]

Hi @ellasolive, welcome to the seller community and congratulations on opening your new store! 🙌

If you haven't had the chance already, I'd suggest getting in touch with our Support Team for more details on how Square for Retail and Square Payroll would fit your business needs. In addition, we've created an article that compares Square Register to Square Stand. Have a look here for more clarity: Compare Square Register and Stand.

Hope these resources help get you where you need to be. Please don't hesitate to let us know if any other questions come up.