Square Staff Advanced Access

[Speedgraphic]

Why does it cost $420 dollars a year for Square to allow me to lock employees out of the ability to transfer money out of our Square savings balances to wherever they want?  Why do I pay for Square payroll only to have Square request another fee just to have the ability to do some check boxes next to new hires that say...oh idk you can steal from the company?  

It's either an additional $35 a month or every new hire has full access to literally every aspect of Square.   I'm ranting a little bit but that's some serious BS.  The nickel and dimming that Square is doing is getting egregious.  Advanced Access doesn't even unlock new features to grow my business it's just some BASIC security controls.  This is outrageous honestly.

[TheRealChipA · Accepted solution]

Hi @Speedgraphic.  So I’ve read and re-read your post.  Either I’m confused, or you are very confused.  If we could get past the “whys” and “what ifs” and other angst, I’d like to get down to facts and see if we can actually help you.  That requires actual information from you about your business and set up.  But first……

With Team Permissions in Square, you can set up each employee with their own account and give them the permission set that you want.  Of course, the free version of the staff functions only allows one permission set (in addition to the Owner set we all have for our logins), but the one set is often enough for businesses without a lot of hierarchy and management.  There’s my first question — other than your full owner permission to everything, is there a reason that one permission set for the rest of your staff is not enough?

If one set of permissions is not enough, can you explain a little how your staff hierarchy works and what sort of permissions are needed at each level?

That’s enough to get started.  I see absolutely no reason why anyone but you, the owner, should have access to any balances, savings accounts, or other such information.  I know for certain that none of my employees can see that stuff. That seems to me to be a setup issue that should be easy to resolve.  But doing that requires the information above, for starters.

I think I can help you with the mechanics and setup issues here.  Obviously, as a fellow seller, I can’t answer all your other questions, complaints, etc, and I won’t even try to do so.  That is not why we are here in the seller community.

I’ll keep an eye out for your reply and hopefully we can get you past this and back to the business of running your business.

[TheRealChipA · Accepted solution]

Hi @Speedgraphic.  So I’ve read and re-read your post.  Either I’m confused, or you are very confused.  If we could get past the “whys” and “what ifs” and other angst, I’d like to get down to facts and see if we can actually help you.  That requires actual information from you about your business and set up.  But first……

With Team Permissions in Square, you can set up each employee with their own account and give them the permission set that you want.  Of course, the free version of the staff functions only allows one permission set (in addition to the Owner set we all have for our logins), but the one set is often enough for businesses without a lot of hierarchy and management.  There’s my first question — other than your full owner permission to everything, is there a reason that one permission set for the rest of your staff is not enough?

If one set of permissions is not enough, can you explain a little how your staff hierarchy works and what sort of permissions are needed at each level?

That’s enough to get started.  I see absolutely no reason why anyone but you, the owner, should have access to any balances, savings accounts, or other such information.  I know for certain that none of my employees can see that stuff. That seems to me to be a setup issue that should be easy to resolve.  But doing that requires the information above, for starters.

I think I can help you with the mechanics and setup issues here.  Obviously, as a fellow seller, I can’t answer all your other questions, complaints, etc, and I won’t even try to do so.  That is not why we are here in the seller community.

I’ll keep an eye out for your reply and hopefully we can get you past this and back to the business of running your business.

[Candlestore · Accepted solution]

@Speedgraphic ;

I agree with @TheRealChipA , I have 2 family members working here and we each have Pins to keep track of our hours.  We do not use Square Payroll and under the Team Permissions I have 2 permissions..... 1 Owner account and 1 Sales Associate account with limited functions.

Which according to the below linked article is available depending which Square POS product you have.  Here is the quote from the article : 'If you have subscribed to Advanced Access, Square for Restaurants Plus, or Square Appointments Premium, you have unlimited custom permissions that you can customize for different levels of access for your team. ... If you have Square Shifts or Square for Retail Plus, you have access to two permission sets included as part of your subscription. '   I avoid my owner account so I do not accidentally do something at the POS that I really should be doing in the back office.  

Here is a Link on Team Permissions  : 5822-employee-permissions 

I hope this helps you keep employees from seeing sensitive information.

[Speedgraphic]

I appreciate you answering and tbh setting me straight on this.  I was truly pulling out my hair trying to get someone signed up.  Basically I assumed that Team Permissions was the universal owner permissions, one and the same.  

While I do find that charging so much for advanced permissions seems like nickel and dimming we store owners who already pay significant fees...I was able to solve my immediate problem.

[TheRealChipA]

I’m very happy to hear that, @Speedgraphic.  I’ll honestly affirm your confusion here.  The Team Permissions Getting Started help document needs some clarifications.  For that matter, so does the Team Permissions screen, which definitely needs a note along the lines of “Account owners have their own permission set with all available permissions.” Or something similar.

Anyway, I’m happy that I could help clarify that.  Be well.

[NoblePiesGuy]

I would like to chime in here with a similar but more complex problem. We are a pie bakery with 5 store locations and another 8 farmers' markets. That makes 13 separate POS locations for payment and pickup. No employees are assigned to individual farmers' markets, rather, they are assigned to an overall "Farmers Markets" location. This keeps us from paying the extra $35/location for each farmers market. The problem is that only the owner account can see the orders for all 8 farmers' markets. This means that everyone, from the bakery manager to our packers, has to log into the Square account as the owner in order to access orders for all of the stores and all of the markets. Logging in with that single owner account gives them access to everything on our Square account. This is not good. It also means that whenever they access the account, I have to send them the authentication code that Square requires to sign in. This is not good.

We need a team permission that will give the proper people access to the orders for all of the locations, even though they are not assigned to those locations. 

Like the original question in this thread, the costs for a solution as things are now are staggering. $35 per location per month is $280 per month. For 12 months, that is an amazing $3,360 per year just to be able to process orders. We have tried many workarounds, but our subscription costs skyrocket each time we change something.