Shipping for Square Invoices

[phantomrain]

The title of this thread has been edited by a Square Moderator from the original: "THERE IS NO SHIPPING Service FOR INVOICES"

Please do not waste your time with all the Shipping Nonsense ,     This is only for On LINE STORES .

If you send an invoice out to your client and they pay, there is no way to ship , 

There is no work around,     There is no direct answer from Square ,  Its is for NULL AN VOID.

I have spent countless hours, please do not waste your time

The PLUS program also is not going to help you with the Shipping . 

Please do not waste your money on that. 

So you cannot use any Shipping Service such as Shippo .

You cannot mark  your invoice as shipped .      

This has been very Frustrating for many as well as the hoops we have been asked to try.   

[dotdotsmiledp]

Is there going to be the ability to indicate shipping as a seperate line item in invoice rather than setting up as an item that needs to be added? Here's the  problem with the current situation. The reports are not accurate. The shipping items are included in those reports and they shouldn't be. If I want to know the # of items sold in a given period these shipping items make that number innacurate. Plus, it looks odd to a customer on the invoice. Please figure out a better way to add shipping charges. Similar to tax or discounts. make it a seperate line item where I can enter multiple shipping charges and just select correct one or even better, let me set up the shipping to automatically add the correct amount based on # of items shipped or weight,etc. 

[Helen]

@dotdotsmiledp I don't have a timeline on when you'll be able to add a separate line for shipping. I've shared your request with the Invoices team and we'll let you know here as soon as we have any updates!

In the meantime, for your reporting, you could download an Item Sales report to your computer and filter it by the Item name. That way you could remove any 'shipping' items from your total sales and have a more accurate number. I know this is a workaround but I hope it helps while we work on making improvements to Invoices! 

[Horsefeathers]

@Helen I see it's been 18 months since this thread started discussing how shipping has to be handled as an item in Square and is therefore included in the sales figure. While your workaround is accurate, it is manual and time-consuming as we move to more interfaces and increase our mail and e-commerce sales. I'm not going to belabor the point as to why this is a flaw in the Square system from an accounting perspective, but we do need to know if Square is planning to release a fix in the next few months. As we move to more automation we see shortcomings with Square, and we're getting the feeling Square is not designed for small businesses, rather, it is focused on sole proprietors do a few hundred transactions a year and low sales volume (we do over 1500 transactions a month). What is Square's timeline to fix the shipping charge being included in sales?

[Chad]

Hello @Horsefeathers, I'm stepping in for @Helen here. 

This thread was originally a feature request for adding a section to collect shipping information from customers on Square Invoices. This feature was added 11/21/2017.

Having a line item built into the invoice for shipping would be a separate feature request. If this is something you'd like to see I encourage you to start a thread about it and I will help you move it to our feature requests board.

Currently we don't provide timelines for feature requests, because the product road map is constantly changing and if I were to give you a date today it might change by Monday. 

Square Point of Sale works for a number of small, medium, and large businesses. For example you can look up Blue Bottle Coffee, Souvlas, and 1-800-GOT-JUNK are some notable businesses at each level that utilize Square.

The system isn't tailored to every kind of business out there, but we do take your feedback seriously when it comes to making updates. 

[mollybee]

I'm a sole prop, and it's still incredibly annoying. We may only do a few hundred invoices with shipping, but most of us don't have employees to handle it for us and don't want to pay our tax preparers even more than we already do. It's hours and hours of work. I find it hard to believe that adding this simple feature would be difficult or time-consuming for Square, so I'd love to know why it's four years later and we still don't have a line for shipping.

[MayaP]

Hi @mollybee,

Thanks for reaching out! 

With Square Invoices you do have the option to request the shipping address. To do so, select Request shipping address under “More options” when creating an invoice.

Please let me know if you have any other questions.

[mollybee]

Please re-read my comment. Your response addresses a concern that's entirely unrelated to what I asked about, and frankly, I get the impression that you didn't actually read my comment and just copied and pasted a boilerplate response. I'm not asking how to request shipping information from a customer. It's very obvious from the checkbox on the invoice that that's already available. It's irrelevant to what I'm asking.

What I would like to know is, as I said, if we will ever be able to add a line to charge customers for shipping on invoices. As I clearly stated, adding shipping as an "item" messes up inventory calculations and confuses customers, making things harder both at the time of purchase and at tax time. Service charges are also not a workable "solution" to this issue. They don't sync with inventory programs, and over the course of the year, cause major discrepancies in what the total shows vs. the total cost when you add up all the lines. Seriously, all I and several other people are asking for is for there to be a line at the bottom where we can add shipping as a shipping charge, not with some workaround that messes things up on our backend. Every other invoicing software I've ever used in any industry has had this option, and I'm baffled as to why Square doesn't offer it. Here's a graphic to explain. If the image doesn't work, you can also access it by clicking this link: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1znPSdtFzUmtUUt-dG222VxwCa_Zr_IZW/view?usp=sharing

[vickiO]

Great job, Mollybee!! Very clear on what it is we want. Thanks for taking the time to write it up!! Maybe it will get someone’s attention❤️

Thank you, VickiO

[MayaP]

Hi @mollybee,

I apologize I did misread your request. Sorry you had to clarify this again. I assure you we are not copying and pasting responses as well. 

As a merchant I completely get how frustrating it is to keep asking for something and it is still not implemented. I cannot speak to other platforms but with our feature requests process there are a lot of factors our team considers before rolling out a feature. 

We field thousands of feature requests each week here on the Seller Community, and bringing these features to fruition often takes an ample amount of time and effort from our engineers. We want to ensure that our releases are not just surface level products, but the best all-around resources to help you grow your business. 

We understand that it might be difficult waiting for something to be built out, but our engineers are working on various different requests brought up by our sellers, and working with Apple, Google, and our other partners in order to approve these changes and be able to push them out in future updates.

I wish we had more insight and better responses to your request right now. If and when the update is rolled out we will make sure to update this thread. 

Thank you again for your feedback. It is appreciated. 

[mollybee]

Come on, be realistic. This isn't a major change. It's a matter of adding another line, just like the line for taxes or the function for adding service charges. It's not a complicated fix, and it costs your customers countless hours of scrutinizing every transaction and manually updating it for our accountants in separate spreadsheets because inventory programs don't allow that kind of update with synced info from Square. Perhaps it's just not being fixed because not enough customers are leaving over it, or maybe they're leaving over it without bringing it to your attention? If I hadn't had the time or energy today to clarify my already well laid-out point, you may not have even realized it was an issue despite other people commenting about it here and on other threads. It really does seem like it's not even on Square's radar. Please look into why this very simple issue that affects many of your customers hasn't had any action taken in the last four years, and do update this thread to let us know.

[dotdotsmiledp]

As a tech writer I completely understand what goes into feature requests. However, there are over 200 comments on this thread alone spanning several years. This is a basic function of any invoicing tool. It's a tax nightmare. Do you people understand the needs of your customers at all?????   This is not a "surface level" request. It's a daily necessity for vendors. THis isn't just a nice to have. It's a function used every day by almost any small business. I am now unsubscribing from this thread that has no resolution in site and your development team has 0 interest in making this happen. I think 5 years is plenty of time for them to have fit this into a release. I'm also quite positive one of your junior level developers or an intern could have made this happen by now.  And with that I'm also probably going to find a new invoicing tool now. 

[mollybee]

I didn't mean to suggest that feature requests are simple. What I was trying to get across is that, of all the many, many feature requests Square receives, I find it difficult to believe that this one was more complicated than the many they've implemented in the last few years. I mean, seriously, they're telling us they solved a giant problem by allowing us to request shipping info from the customer. That's a very small problem compared to the tax nightmare of having to reconcile hundreds of invoices. Most of the time, I have to ask customers for their address before I even set up the invoice, otherwise I wouldn't know how much to charge them for shipping. Asking the customer to give you their mailing address when they contact you about the order isn't a major inconvenience.it's time for them to say they're never going to release this super basic feature because they'd rather add elaborate paid features for their premium subscribers. It makes zero sense that the shipping line wasn't included in the first place. I agree that one of their junior level developers or an intern could have made this happen. It's literally just service fees, but on a separate line called "shipping." Working with Apple, Google, and other partners on it won't be complicated because, again, it's a basic function used every day. It's not something new to them. Most other invoicing providers offer it.

[mollybee]

Is this feature ever going to happen? It's pretty ridiculous that you can't add a shipping charge onto an invoice, and service charges are not a workable substitute because they don't sync with my inventory database. It just comes out looking like there's a discrepancy in the invoice when it syncs. It's also a huge pain to have to create a separate service charge for every potential weight class and zone. 

Adding the shipping as a line item isn't an acceptable solution. That a) prevents users from adding a % discount to the whole order and still charging the correct amount for shipping, b) messes up COGS and shipping calculations for tax time, and c) confuses customers/looks unprofessional.

Both databases that I've used don't let you edit/add/delete line item or shipping prices after they sync, so I just have to try to remember them all come tax time. Maybe the ones I use are unusual, but they're the only ones suited for my industry. 

I can't imagine that adding a line for shipping at the bottom is all that difficult. I'd love an explanation as to why it hasn't happened despite people requesting it for years. I'm considering going back to PayPal, even though their fees are higher. It's just not worth the headache to confuse my customers and/or go through every invoice at tax time and sort it all out.

[irened]

Yes, I am just setting up my invoice and rather shocked it can't do this. I set up a paypal invoice yesterday and it was MUCH EASIER TO DO. The user interface is much more confusing. Sad face.

[mollybee]

I'm seriously considering going back to PayPal, even for my many $5 sticker orders that I ship with a stamp. Yeah, PayPal takes $0.49 as their flat fee, compared to Square's $0.10, but at this point, I'd almost rather lose 10% than have to deal with the massive hassle of manually accounting for everything and explaining to my accountant why all my database info and Square info have conflicting numbers. It's hours and hours of tedious work that probably isn't paying for itself with the lower flat fee on Square. The only real reason I'm hesitating is that I don't want to confuse my repeat/monthly subscription customers by switching back to PayPal when I just shifted everything to Square a year ago.

[georgec]

Yet another request for this basic functionality for invoicing: make shipping a separate item so it's not affected by a percentage discount. 

This thread is going on 9 months with the request unimplemented, and I doubt this thread was the first time this missing functionality was requested. 

Long overdue. 

[EJ_]

Thanks for the feedback here @georgec

It's definitely not the first time I've heard this requested by a seller, so our Product Team is aware of it. 

However, there's nothing new that I'm able to share at this time unfortunately. We'll keep advocating and sending over your thoughts, and hopefully we can get something rolled out for you in the future. 

[georgec]

Is there somewhere we can view the actual roadmap for feature implementation and/or priority? I see so many updates added to the mobile app that seem frivoluous, and to be honest I do not see much if any updates being added to the front-end of the website. 

I'd love to know what they are actually working on and consider essential. 

[EJ_]

@georgec We're not able to share any information pertaining to features that are not released to the public.

I wish we could, as that would make us even more transparent with our sellers, but it's not something we're able to do. 

[Arboutique]

This comment was merged from an existing thread "Customer adding address"

Posting this for the  Square team- 

I run a boutique that is a combo of in person and Facebook sales. 

I really need the option for customers to input their own address in during online payment. Nobody ever reads their invoices or remembers to email them to me and it’s a huge hassle. As my online business grows, square isn’t going to work for me without this feature as it takes me extra time. 

[Chad]

Hey @Arboutique, this a feature request that we're already tracking! 

I went ahead and merged your thread with this one. If there are any updates we will post them in this thread!