Is there yet a way to add a service charge automatically?

[NaroEscape]

We'd like to be able to automatically add a service charge to our sales. I've seen posts from years ago stating the same desire from others, and see that it was being 'worked on' but to date it's still not a function that I can find? Having to manually enter it is time consuming and honestly gets forgotten when things get busy. 

How can we have a service charge automatically applied? I know it's done in many other systems. 

[TheRealChipA]

Hey @NaroEscape.  While this has been requested a few times, it is still not available for POS transactions.  Currently, service charges can be automatically applied to online orders, but that’s it.  Honestly, I’m not sure that it has ever been stated that it is being worked on, unless by “worked on” it was meant that they are considering it.  I know that recently, Square had to clamp down on card fee surcharges (I quote Square help documents here) “Because payment networks recently updated their rules around credit card surcharging…”

Can you be more specific about what kind of automatic service charges you have that would apply to every transaction at a POS?  Having more information might help me/us brainstorm workarounds or suggestions for a different approach.

[NaroEscape]

We conduct business 3 ways: online web store, in our brick and mortar store, and "on location" at events (we sell automotive racing gear and set up a pop-up location at the tracks during local club races). We've considered charging an "on location" convenience fee to cover all the time and expense of when we're at a track (many tracks charge a vendor fee) and want to just incorporate that into our charges. Other vendors just charge a higher price for their goods when 'on location', but we can't because all our inventory is sync'd with our website store, so whatever the website shows is what we see on the Square POS. 

Having to manually include a service charge when we are busy would get forgotten most of the time. We tried it once and forgot on nearly every transaction. 

[TheRealChipA]

Thanks for the thorough explanation @NaroEscape.  It all makes perfect sense, now.  Unfortunately, I’m coming up dry on any possible workaround.  I had two different ones in mind, but all of them led to dead ends when I tried testing them.

Honestly, your idea of having automatic service charges on our POS comes up short, as well.  Here’s why.  You’d ONLY want that charge to be added for remote events, on certain POS devices.  You wouldn’t want that charge to be added to your brick & mortar POS ever.

Honestly, I can see why Square is resisting automatic service charges at the POS level.  But you might be successful requesting a different sort of setting.  I see this request taking the form of asking Square to have a POS setting that toggles on and off automatic service charges.  You could then turn it on for your “traveling POS devices” and leave it off on your store POS devices.  It’s worth a shot — just remember that this is by no means a quick or short-term fix.  It only starts a process.  To submit a feature request, head over to the Ideate Board.

FYI — the other ideas I had that did not work out were:

1. Tracking inventory at the item level instead of the variation level.  However, currently it seems Square does not support this.
2. Setting up a modifier list to include an add-on fee, and make this required.  The brick wall there was that this modifier set would also show up online, which would confuse customers to no end.  It would be nice if Square allowed modifier sets to ONLY show up on a POS or ONLY show up online, etc.  But this feature is not supported right now.

Sorry I can’t be more help here.  Most likely I’ll keep mulling this over in my head all day and if I get a brilliant idea, I’ll come back and let you know.

Regards,

[NaroEscape]

thanks for trying. 

and it wouldn't be an issue since we don't use Square POS in the store. We use direct into Quickbooks. We get VERY LITTLE walk in business, mainly because we're never around (always at a remote site), but we do get some. so instead of having to enter a Square sale into QB when I'm sitting there with QB open, I just run the card payment and invoice directly from QB. 

But in reality, since you can make multiple locations in Square, it could be something tagged to the specific location in the location settings. You can set up unique taxes in each location, why not a service charge? 

I like a lot of things about Square, but there are just enough holes in things that would really save us time and money (like the syncing things across all locations that you replied to in a different thread) that we're considering a wholesale change of many things, including moving away from Square.