Hi @GaryDawson1. Square is set up to collect and distribute funds for one business entity per Square account only. There are a myriad of legal reasons for this, but the one that applies here is the fact that this is the only way to ensure that income is reported to the IRS as required. Yes, you can have multiple locations for one business entity (LLC, S-Corp, etc), but they all share the same EIN, bank account, etc. This ensures IRS and other compliance. If you have three EINs, you need three Square accounts, and there is no legal/effective alternative.
In order to have a separate account for funds for the non-profit, the non-profit must receive those funds from direct sales in its own Square account. In other words, that non-profit Square account would have to have its own site for ticket sales.
One other gotcha I want to point out with your current set up. At the end of the year, you are receiving a 1099 from Square showing all card sales processed FOR ALL THREE WEBSITES. This means that whichever is the entity of record with Square they are the company that the IRS thinks is receiving all of that money. Therefore, should that company ever be audited, the IRS will expect to see all three companies’ sales on its return, because legally that is how it is. And I know for certain that the IRS is constantly comparing 1099s from card processors to tax returns, profit or not. When they don’t match consistently, that is a huge red flag that will trigger audits.
You can, of course, fix this by issuing 1099s to each of the other two companies for funds you’ve sent to them during the year. But you’d need an audit trail of those transactions, which is probably why the accountant you mentioned is a little leery right now.
I hope that makes some sense. I can answer further questions, if I missed something.
Regards,
Gary,
Before answering, I checked a few things out to confirm my suspicions. What I found is that it does not look like the Duplicate Site function will work across multiple accounts. I see no mechanism on OUR dashboards where you can duplicate a site from one Square account to another. That’s the bad news.
Realizing your time is valuable, I can only suggest now that you get on the phone to Square Customer Success. In order not to waste a lot of time with the whys and all of that, tell them specifically that you have two Square accounts and you need to duplicate your web site from one to the other. They don’t need to know that you have three companies on one account, and so forth, and telling them so will just make things more complicated than they need to be. Also, don’t ask them to MOVE the site from point A to point B, just in case something messes up and you need to get the original back for any reason. They should just copy it and allow you to delete the old one when you are ready. If they ask why, just tell them that you created the web site using the wrong account and don’t want to have to completely rebuild it. Most likely, the first person you talk to will need to escalate this to the engineers, because this is not a common request, I’m sure.
I wish I could give you a better answer, but I can’t with the tools I see available to us.
One more thing. I’m assuming (for no good reason) that you don’t have any item list that needs to be transferred to the new account. If you do, keep in mind that you do have the Item Export and Import functions. Export will create an Excel file that you can then import into any Square account you wish to. So, if you have items and don’t want to add them manually in the new account, you can do it this way.
I hope that an engineer can help you. If you think of it when all is said and done, I’d love to know how this ends up, just for my own reference in the future.
Best of luck!
I wish you well!
I should mention one thing about item backup, because there might be an issue you need to clarify. Events are only online items. And, while they will be added to your master item list, I’m not sure that the event-specific stuff like date/time and venue will be backed up. You’ll definitely want to clear that up with customer success, too, because I do not see an Item Backup function in the Square Online side of things. Hopefully I’m just missing something.
