It is all dependent on what you want to see as a business owner for Financial Reports. Square is a Credit Card Processor and as such deals with mainly credit card processing with add on features like Inventory for items for sale, and some basic forms for Financials. I have a retail/ manufacturing business, as such Square can not keep track of Build Assemblies like QuickBooks can. For me a Build Assembly would be 1 Jar, 1 Lid, 2 Wicks, so many LBS of wax, X amount of scent and X amount of Dye to make a Candle. So when I make say 40 28oz Macintosh apple candles, QuickBooks can deduct the correct amount of items that are required to make that many candles. The other thing is QuickBooks does the financials of a business in more detail for ease of use at Tax time and what banks look at for a loan. QuickBooks can show how a businesses financials are at any point in time, like Profit and Loss or Balance Sheet. With QuickBooks you also can see how much you spend on different categories like, Expenses, and helps with your Checkbook. QuickBooks monitors all money going in and out of a Business, Square tracks the Income mainly. So with having Square Connected to QuickBooks, the data from money coming in can be put right into QuickBooks easily. Otherwise you would have to manually enter the sales report data from Square into QuickBooks and possibly have an error which can happen with automatically imports too. Rounding errors between software are not always calculated the same. Square may calculate sales tax on each item and round each items tax to the nearest penny, where as QuickBooks might take the subtotal and apply the sales tax then round to the nearest penny. This small difference can add up and leave ppl searching where is this penny or 2 cents. Other people using Square may take the end of day sales report and enter the data right into QuickBooks, Gross Sales, Sales Tax Collected, Returns, Square Fees and enter this as one single Daily Sales which will work for keeping the financials up date and will avoid the rounding errors since they enter the actual numbers manually daily. But if you need QuickBooks to track Inventory also, then you would need to import each item you also sold each day or have software that does this automatically or on a few key strokes to import this for you. I went with a program that I bought call Transaction Pro Importer, to import all my sales data from Square as an individual Sales Transaction or as QuickBooks calls it a Sales Receipt. I import from Square to QuickBooks the Transaction ID, Customers Name, Date, Item(s) SKU(s), Quantity sold, the Sales Tax, Deposit ID, etc
Here is what I import to QuickBooks to have the details of each Sale:
As you see at the top it says Square Sales Receipt, that shows me that it was an In Store Sale since I use a Different report to be loaded to QuickBooks for my Online Sales which uses the same Program Transaction Pro Importer. Just the fields get renamed by a custom Sales Receipt. This way my Square Transaction ID, Payment ID and Deposit ID can all be looked up quickly in either Square or QuickBooks to find a transaction that could have a problem and fix it.
Here is a 20 minute video of how I import from Square to QuickBooks Desktop. This works for any CSV file to QuickBooks. Square to QuickBooks Video
My first attempt at doing a YouTube video. Depending on how many transactions you have, is how long it takes to import from CSV to QuickBooks.
