In your experience, what makes Square reports/ reporting valuable (or not)?

[Carolinad]

Hi everyone!

I'm a researcher at Square, and I’m exploring how sellers like you use reporting tools—both within and outside of Square. I’m curious to learn:

• What aspects of Square reporting do you find most valuable, and why?

• What are the most important business decisions that Square reports help you make?

• Have your reporting needs changed over time? If so, how have your strategies or tools changed?

Let’s discuss! I’m looking forward to learning from your experiences. Thanks in advance!

[TCSlaguna]

@Carolinad 

We love Square reports for the following reasons: 

Year-over-year sales comparison

Category Rollups - We look at sales based on the category rollups of Services, Retail, Events

Scheduling employees based on busiest time of day/week

What items are doing well, what items should we no longer carry

Challenges we face: 

Square Appointments does not have a report for me to be able to calculate my Service Providers' payouts based on the date the service was rendered, whether the appoint was paid/unpaid, and how much tip they received. This report would save us hours per week. 

[TheRealChipA]

Hey @Carolinad.  A few thoughts.

1. I’m one of those odd ducks that does not use or find valuable any POS reports.  If I need to check up on how business is going, I use the Dashboard App or web-based dashboard reports.  I have never (except out of curiosity) used any POS-based reporting, and doubt that I ever will.  In a way, I wish it were optional to completely remove those from all POS devices.
2. I find the new Trends reporting to be most valuable and use that on a very regular (almost daily) basis.  Usually I focus on Last 7-day, Last 30-day and Last 52-week trends, but occasionally will review This Month and This Year, mostly to compare to 30-day and 52-week numbers/trends.
3. Obviously, I love the Dashboard App.  It has its quirks and weirdness sometimes, but it is my most valuable reporting tool, hands down.
4. My reporting needs that a POS vendor can help me with are pretty simple.  Most of the standard Square reports are nice to have around, but I rarely use them unless I have a question to be answered that they can help me with.
5. Square reports are most useful when I’m doing longer-term planning.  For example, forecasting sales for the next quarter, or the next month, or the new season.  In these cases I download CSVs and use spreadsheets to apply what-ifs to give me a good starting point for sales and labor planning.

My reporting needs have definitely changed over my 10+ years of using Square.  These days I’m finding that the standard Square reports answer most of my sales-related questions just fine.  That hasn’t always been true.  I used to have an entire spreadsheet of sales analysis reports.  But in recent years, I’ve found I no longer need those, which is good.

Honestly, most of my reporting needs these days centers around sales and expense forecasting.  Obviously, this is something that Square can only partially help with since it requires data not only from Square but also from my accounting software (Zoho Books).  So, until Zoho (or some third party) comes up with reporting fusion software that connects to both data sets, I’m stuck with CSVs from both platforms being imported into a spreadsheet to do my 30-day cash flow forecasting.

Probably the one glaring hole I find frustrating in Square reporting is the lack of a single top-down report that shows where my money went.  Hopefully, the beta of the Sales Summary report will remedy this, finally.  But we all need one consolidated report (AND consolidated report API) that shows product/service sales and add-ons (taxes, tips, etc), along with all money deducted/moved to other places (fees, loan payments, savings transfers, bank account transfers, etc).  All of this information can be found somewhere, of course, but finding it involves clicking here, there and everywhere to get one piece of information, another there, and yet another somewhere else.  It should not be that hard to see where every penny of my money has gone for any desired reporting period.  Like I said, hopefully the Sales Summary beta finally remedies this rather odd oversight.

[JUYBoutique20 · Accepted solution]

We use Square reports every day.  Love, love, love it.  

What aspects of Square reporting do you find most valuable, and why?                                                                                        

I love the month-to-month comparison and this day last year comparison.  I have a planner that I keep all my numbers in.  For example, monthly I compare my sales growth and my inventory growth level.  What is my % of growth or decline in sales versus the % of growth or decline in inventory.  It helps me to know when I bought too heavy or too lite and so I can better prepare the next year. 

What are the most important business decisions that Square reports help you make?

Whether or not I have the sales to expand my business, how much inventory I need to buy for the seasons, my sell through on items and if they're among my top pieces or my top categories. 

Have your reporting needs changed over time? If so, how have your strategies or tools changed?  

They definitely have changed over the year.  Alot of the things I keep up with Square reports have the numbers I need, but it would be great if they were already calculated in those reports.  One thing I really wish would be added to inventory reports is the total pieces I have in stock and under each category how many pieces I have in stock.  

[DinaLRosenberg]

Like most I like month-over-month or playing around with sales over a period-of-time that I specify just to see where we are (or aren't).

[Doran]

I'm like most that I use year over year or month over month to track how things are going.  I usually track last year's holiday season versus the current year.  

I also like to pull up what my top 25 selling products are and my best selling facial service over different time periods.  

I'd love an end of day report that I can push to my accountant that includes everything on the Square register daily report print out but ADD in deposit info like fees, loan repayments, square savings, Square debit card transaction so the final number equals what goes into the bank that day.  

[Candlestore]

@Carolinad ;

When I first started with Square (2019) I liked that I could see my daily weekly and monthly sales, at a quick Glance on my Square Stand or on my Square Dashboard webrowser.  Then after being with Square a few years I realized this Quick report only was showing a days sales report close to the Date.  I started looking for ways to see if my weekend Before or After the holiday was better with sales.  Which items sold best, not only the top 5 because we have more than 10,000 items.  Maybe the best by $ amount or the Best total sold.   Then I would see Square would say my sales compared to Last year on the closest date was $0.00.  To look someplace else to find out were were closed.  Maybe a snowday or holiday but no way to see WHY were were closed or to enter this type of data to Square.  I had to start a Google Calendar to show this.  As business continued and was trying to figure out how to get my sales data to Quickbooks Desktop easily, I kept downloading both my Transactions Items.csv and my Transactions Details.csv to use Excel and Power Query to merge these two csv files as 1 to upload into Quickbooks Desktop.  Now as I got better with this I realized I can download my Transaction Items Csv file for my past years data as one file.  Did this for each year so far and used power query in excel to get the data from all the Transaction Items csv files and megered or appended this to one larger file that can be added on to each year.  This large file I turn into a Pivot table to have Excel figure out what my best selling items are based on more details than the reports in Square.  I can see items sold for a certain week every year, or month.  I can also quickly see what my best selling Items are during time frames in a year.  So like September through Mid november anything with Pumpkin sells more, after that anything with Christmas sells more for example.

I think the reports need more information to see which items sell more or less to know which ones to buy and which ones to discount and discontinue.  Maybe by category or $ amount of sale price.  Are my higher ticket items selling but slow or are they only selling when on sale?

You ask if my needs change over time?  Well yes the first year with Square there is nothing for Reports to compare to but now with 5 yrs of data there is more to compare and see trends possibly forming.  

Now your reports at least for me are a quick view of how this day is going compared to last week.  For choices on what to order or my sales I look more at my Excel sheets of how things are going.  Basically I have the Year files and also my past years sales that Power query merges, then I download the Years sales and delete the past monthly downloads to avoid duplicates.

I am more a numbers guy and like to see what is selling and what is not, not just hay you made X in Y time frame.