Update on how printing & categories work

[Rp3]

I feel like there needs to be an explicit update for how categories and printing work.

For the longest time it was that each item could only have 1 category and that was for reporting and printing. Then, you were able to add items to multiple categories BUT only the reporting category was used for routing printers. Now, it seems like printers will print any category so if an item has multiple categories and the printer is set up to print all of those categories, it will print a duplicate ticket for each category.

I only found this out because I was playing around with adding multiple categories by creating a new category to test what I could do with it, when I got a call from my restaurant saying that some items were printing duplicates. So, I guess when you create a new category each printer automatically adds it? I'm really not sure but when I removed the new category the duplicates stopped printing.

When I look for clarity on how categories, printer profiles, reporting all relate to each other and how they work, its mostly out of date and incomplete information.

I'd love to have someone from square clarify how all this works so I can set up our categories in the best way for my business.

Also, if anyone wants to discuss their experience on this topic, it would be great to hear what other sellers have discovered about how the system actually works.

I hope this makes sense and we can begin an informative discussion.

[MayaP]

Hey @Rp3 thanks for reaching out and initiating this conversation. I will tag some super-sellers who can share their insights. Thank you guys if you need anything let me know! 

@Headpinz @jjsmeatshak1 @timberhillwine @Getonthebus 

[Getonthebus]

Printers and Square can sometimes be a challenge. I kept running into issues where i only had (only wanted) food printing in the kitchen and not beverages or merchandise and then all of the sudden I was getting EVERYTHING printing to the kitchen and sometimes nothing at all. So after working with Square technical folks and learning that Square was making updates by the handfuls - I was having to run updates on each device on a weekly basis. Once I did that for several weeks, things started working well. But with all that being said, I am only having one category print in the kitchen which is perfect for us.

Hope this provides a little bit of help!

[MayaP]

I appreciate your sharing your insight! 😊

[Rp3]

Thanks for getting a dialog going!

Our kitchen has 3 physical stations, 2 printers and 8 printer profiles, (FOH has a bar printer and an Expo Printer). Some items get fired at all three physical stations, some at two and some only at one so the routing can be complicated.

I still have my profiles setup the way I had it setup when printer "stations" were a thing (they were replaced by printer profiles). This was also when printers ONLY printed "reporting categories", in fact, at the time there was only one category per item, so my reporting categories are completely useless for reporting which has created downstream issues with accounting among other things.

I'm too scared to mess around with it when we have a service coming up in case I screw everything up and create chaos. Thats why I kind of just want to understand how all this is actually designed to work. Somebody at Square must have had a vision for what they wanted the system to be capable of doing, right? 

For instance, do printers still only print reporting categories or not? I can't tell with the tinkering that I've dared to do because the results were inconsistent. There are also sub-categories now, so how does that work into the whole printing system? If you assign a parent category to a printer profile, will it also print all the subcategories? What are subcategories even for anyways? How do they relate to reporting? 

We also do online orders and orders routed in from delivery apps, so I had to make duplicate printer profiles for online orders when printer profiles got introduced or else they would print double tickets for all online orders, however, after I made the new profiles, they all have warnings saying that they will print double tickets, but they don't, so, what's the deal with that? How is it supposed to work?

I still think square should just completely uncouple reporting categories from printer routing, just have dedicated printer categories, it's how every other POS I've ever used does it.

I could go on, but I think that's enough to hopefully get a little clarity going.

[Getonthebus]

With regard to the printer profiles and online orders.... we have one station that manages our online orders and its printer profile manages both online orders as well as in house orders. All of our other seven stations have a different printer profile that manages only our in house orders. I had them set up to all manage everything and then one day the online orders stopped printing completely. With help from Square's technical support - we deleted ALL of our printer profiles and re-established them as mentioned above.