Customer Accounts and/or Statements

[KelJopuka]

Hello all, I am wondering if there is a way to have customer accounts or statements? Not through the online store, but for invoices. 

Scenario 1 is, Customer A has an invoice outstanding and I need to issue another invoice, I want a way to see that the customer has something outstanding and combine the two somehow. Or, be able to send the customer a statement of their invoices with those paid and those outstanding. 

Scenario 2 is. Customer B has paid more than they had outstanding into the bank account, so, therefore, has a credit. When I go to create an invoice for them I would like to see they have a credit and apply it to the invoice. 

Is there a way to do either of these in the invoice system as it stands? Just trying to cut down the workload and negate the need to also run spreadsheets separately. 

Cheers
Kel 

[Seamus]

Hi @KelJopuka,

At the moment customer accounts are not a feature of Square, so much of the suggested functionality here is not currently available - invoices can't be merged and we don't feature a customer credit system. 

One possible workaround would be to issue your customer an eGift card if they've ever overpaid via bank transfer, however, this is likely to be more cumbersome to manage and require more work than your current tracking system.

Sorry I can't be of more help here! In the long term, I think customer accounts would be a great feature to have, though at the moment it's not something we plan on releasing in the near future. I'll pass your feedback onto our product team though, for consideration.

[KelJopuka]

Thanks @Seamus 

I think I often come up with dreams of features that don't exist haha. Thanks for getting back to me 🙂 

[amjessey]

Hello @Seamus and @KelJopuka 

I have also previously submitted a feature request for customer accounts. We see it as an integral business process and we hope this is something that will be developed.

Only yesterday, we have a particular situation that needs resolving; which is we need to place £ 1,000 credit on a client's account to redeem at a later date. He has one outstanding invoice with us. He is going to pay this via a bank payment and overpay it by £ 1,000, which means he will have £ 1,000 of credit to redeem on another invoice later on. First of all, can we record an overpayment on an invoice? I don't think so, and this would be the first feature request. The overpayment would need to be recorded on his account as credit which he can redeem in the future anywhere he wishes, e.g. POS, Invoices, Online etc. 

If the current workaround is to issue a Gift Card for the overpayment then this is a problem with this, apart from being a cumbersome process with no central oversight of account credits of this nature, Gift Cards are limited to £ 750, so the second feature request is to increase this limit to a much higher value (I have previously made this feature request in another post) and to provide a place in Dashboard for oversight of all accounts.

Then, there needs to be a way of viewing and sending account statements that show how much credit he has on his account as well as account activity. Again, POS, Invoices and Online need to be all included. It also needs to be compatible with Loyalty so any rewards are shown in it. The statement needs to be adaptable with filters so it shows varying amounts of detail according to the seller's wishes, e.g. date ranges.  

We use Amaka integration with our Xero account and of course, the integration aspects need to be considered so the customers' account credit is shown in Xero as soon as the money is received from the customer. This is because if we hold money on account this needs to be reflected in the company accounts for tax and regulatory purposes.

We have devised a customer account credit system for a specific group of customers; basically, they pay money into the account, and we increase that value by 10% with our compliments and record this as an account credit to use at a later date. What we currently do (something which is admin heavy considering the heavy lifting Square could do if there was software development) is to record in Square the payments into his account via an Invoice, then manually record this also in a spreadsheet adding the complementary 10%; then, again in the spreadsheet, record any credit being redeemed and in the Invoice show this redeeming of credit via a discount row. It works but it is not great because there are complications when it comes to reporting as we don't want to show account credit being redeemed as a discount, we want to show it as account credit being redeemed.

N.B. I have created a post previously on the customer account credit system we have devised.

It would be good if these points were put forward to the developers, including the Loyalty team, for discussion with some feedback as to what their view is on it and where it sits in the development cycle. I can also share with Square the spreadsheet we have devised.

N.B. we are a UK seller. 

Thank you.

@tranguyen 

[Arie]

Heya @amjessey,

Thank you for writing in with these suggestions! 

I'm sorry to hear that issuing a gift card wouldn't be a suitable workaround for your use case. 

Right now, overpaying invoices isn't a feature we have, but this is something you can post on our feature request board for UK sellers here. When it comes to feature requests, a number of factors are considered, such as how many sellers express interest in the feature, and other features currently in development, just to name a few. By posting on the feature request board, other sellers can add their votes and feedback to show the Square Invoices team that this is a needed feature. Providing details as to why this is crucial for your business like you have here, is really useful. We appreciate your input!