What do you recommend for occasional one-off sales you don't want to include in typical reports?

[ClayburnG]

We have a drink shop, but we also host birthday parties with specific catering packages available.  When someone pays, we process that through the POS.  But this throws off our sales report data because we might have $200 sales per day on average, but then there will be one day with an extra $400 from someone paying for a party.

Is there a way to exclude it from typical sales?  Or should it be categorized in some way that we can exclude it when we need reports?  Ideally I'd not want to manually exclude things because we typically look at the daily sales to see how we're doing...but this would throw that off considerably.

[TheRealChipA]

Hey @ClayburnG.  There is no mechanism in Square (or any POS system I am familiar with) to do what you are asking.  We all have this very issue from time to time and just have to deal with it.  If you are selling the same products and/or services to the party as you do normally, there would be no way to categorize or exclude these sales because they ARE sales for that day, period.  The manual option is the only viable option available to you.

That being said, it WOULD be helpful if Square had a free-format notes field that could serve as a “manager log” for each day.  If we could make notes in this field that were included in reports, that would be helpful.  But, currently, no such thing exists.

[Candlestore · Accepted solution]

@ClayburnG ;

I run into the same type of issue, we have normal days of sales and then especially from Sept to November we get wholesale orders that are larger because of the Holidays.  I created an Item called ' Wholesale' you could do Birthday Parties for example instead.  I do this because Square does not allow me to have a Retail and a Wholesale pricing for my items. The Wholesale Item I leave the Price Blank and have to enter the price at the time of sale.  Now I have a few ideas that might help you create a custom report in Square too. 

Create a Category Party Sales, Create a Vendor Group Sales.  Both of these can be whatever you like them just so you know what they mean.

Now we Create an Item something like Birthday Party ( This will be what shows on a Receipt.)  For this item have it in Category Party Sales and have vendor Group Sales for example.  Now in Square Reports you can Filter and unselect the item category or Vendor.  If you use this report regularly create a Custom Report with the Item, Category or Vendor not selected.  Now in your App for Days sales all sales are shown but you can look at your reports on a computer in Squares Dashboard or Create the Custom report that does not show these types of sales.  The other thing to keep in mind is if you sell a birthday package that is always the Same number of items and the same catered items you could create the item Birthday Party as a Bundle which is 10 Soft Drinks, 5 pizzas and 1 sheet cake for example as 1 price which would reduce your invetory by the quantities in the Bundle.  Here is how to create a Bundle in Square : 8057-create-managing-bundles-with-square-for-retail 

My other way of creating Birthday Party as an Item and then manually entering a Price would not reduce your inventory of items that you would have setup in a Bundle.  

Here is more about custom Reports with Square :6104-creating-custom-reports-in-the-online-dashboard