Does anyone else use Square for a dry cleaner?

[Naddy]

Hi everyone, I run a dry cleaners that has been running square for payments only for about 2 1/2 years in Brisbane Australia. Its is great for taking payments and can itemize receipts, linking to accounting and payroll etc easily. But for doing the original docket when the customer drops off an item square is lacking this ability. So we continue to use paper dockets for this. From what I gather square’s open ticket system needs just minor printing options and would make this software great.

If you set up open tickets you can easily start adding items, say a suit, then you can click print bill which automatically starts the new ticket (for some reason doesnt Auto number properly until paid needs to be fixed) If you have print ticket stubs checked on the printer (we have a kitchen printer that prints with indelible ink on water proof paper.. same as most d/c pos systems and a regular thermal printer for receipts) but if you have more than one item it won’t cut each one it just lists them for a kitchen style arrangement also this feature only works on thermal printer and is greyed out on the kitchen printer... (also need to be fixed as it is capable of doing it.) If there was a setting that cut each item you could use these as tickets for each article of clothing.

So basically my wish list is

The Print Bill feature prints a docket for the customer that lists items and price and is auto-numbered.

Also print out a itemised docket for items that would allow order placing/bagging.

Then Ticket stubs of each item in an order printed on the ‘kitchen printer’ to be attached to garments. (on garment label, auto number, date wanted and what the garment is etc.)

Also need a collection day, added maybe in the notes in the ticket section (apple date scroll thing for date and time would be awesome) and these show on all tickets printed.

Another issue is when you have a suit you need two or three dockets where it would only print one, and option in the item catagory to change the number of garment tickets per item would be great.... a way around it is not having suit and just adding jacket and trouser but is just adding extra complexity to the counter person.

Would love to sit down with someone at square to nut out a simple solution. As it would be great not only for dry cleaners but clothing alterations places, boot making all these kinds of service industries.

My other option is to re-write it and use squares register api, but i feel like i’d be rewriting the wheel for minimal change to squares already great system, also would cost me a fair bit of time and money that I don’t have. 

Sorry about the rant...  I wrote that pretty quickly. 🙂 

[Naddy]

If I go the register API route does anyone know a developer that has worked with PoS’s and squares Register API before?

Also happy to provide feeback and beta test any features you guys might implement.

[Seamus]

Hey @Naddy,

Thanks for reaching out and providing us with such detailed feedback about your usage of Square and how additional receipt and ticket options would be of benefit to your business. I can certainly see how your feature recommendations would be a great help to dry cleaning businesses and I'll pass them on to our product team for consideration.

As a free Point of Sale app designed to be usable by businesses of all types, we get a lot of requests for different industry specific features - this means we have to carefully prioritise what new features would be of benefit to the greatest number of merchants who use our app. While I can't make any guarantees that these features would be implemented in the future, I'll make sure your feedback and input is heard - the more demand we see for a given feature, the more likely it is to be build!

One thing I've noted with your use case is that there might be a bit of confusion here between "Open Tickets" and printed "Tickets". Open Tickets is a function designed primarily for hospitality use, where a group starts a transaction called an "Open Ticket" at the start of a dining session that new items can be added to over the course of dining session. These are intended to be closed off at the end of the dining session, rather than kept open over an extended period of time.

As a dry-cleaner, you may find it easier to simply run a transaction through checkout as a regular transaction, rather than an Open Ticket. If you're not already using it, I think your business would also benefit from use of our Customer Directory, which you can use to track your customers purchase history and easily tie transactions to customers.

Please let me know if you have any questions!

[Naddy]

Hi @Seamus

Thanks for the response. I understand how hospitality uses the open ticket function for tables etc, but in a service industry like ours/and others we run a similar setup but we open a ticket with a customer when they first arrive and drop off items, we itemize what they have and ticket each item, get a time/date when they would like to collect there items, then items are paid when picked up. This is, like you say not really possible with squares open tickets function but it is very similar. Unlike a restaurant we would have say 500+ open tickets at a time. 

Just really enquiring to see if it is something square would consider developing or would I be better off developing something usings square api’s?

Thanks again for your considerations!

[Naddy]

@Seamus also noticed the fulfillment function thats is being beta tested at the moment... looks kinda like what we are trying to achieve ...

https://medium.com/square-corner-blog/orders-push-public-beta-25bda7c31521

[Seamus]

Hey @Naddy,

Yep, we're always looking at ways to improve our POS and add useful new features! Our product team regularly browse this Seller Community forum for feedback and we'll pass it on as well. I can't say if and when the Orders Push Beta will make it to Australia, but I am passing your feedback on to the author of the linked article as it's great feedback that highlights a specific use case 🙂

The reason I caution against using Open Tickets for this purpose, especially if you have a lot of them open at once, is that large and numerous open tickets have been known to crash the POS app due to consuming all the app's available memory. This has most commonly happened when Open Tickets have been used an a tab-keeping system at cafes over a prolonged period of time (eg weeks/months rather than a single session), but I'd also be wary of using Open Tickets in the fashion you've described. Just in case, I'd be tracking these on a system outside of Square to make sure these records are secure, even if it's just in a basic spreadsheet!

[Naddy]

 @Seamus thanks again, I know a few people in my industry that use square the same way as I do... I feel current dry cleaning and laundry POS’s are lacking in their usability and stuck in the 80’s. Also I feel it would open up a new market for square. Not just in laundry and dry cleaning but many service based small businesses.

[scamper65]

Did you ever get this problem solved? This is exactly what we are wanting to do in WA. We are using a pos system that is clunky and having to run square to take payments, so wanted to combine the 2 but it seems that unless you pay a premium you cannot get anything that would simply work.

[Arie]

Thanks for checking in on this thread, @scamper65! 

We don't have an update on these features at the moment. 

You could still consider using open tickets, as suggested in this thread, but keep in mind that Square's Point of Sale app is built out for basic stock management, and payment processing rather than a more complex ticketing system for a dry cleaning business, for instance. We have some more specific, purpose-built software options boasting additional features, such as Square Appointments, Square for Retail and Square for Restaurants. Maybe we'll release an option that's tailored for dry cleaners in the future 🤞.

[scamper65]

Thankyou, as noted at the start of this thread, this does not need to be anything totally specific to dry cleaners. Almost any service industry would benefit from this kind of thing. There would be a huge market that Square is currently missing out on. Dry Cleaners, Alterations, Mechanics, Repair industry. All would benefit!