How can I track my purchases/items from my vendor using Square for Retail?

[texasbathhouse]

[The title of this thread has been edited from the original: Tracking my suppliers]

i want to be able to input my receipts where i buy from suppliers. where and how do i do that?

ie: soap supplier ingredients, chicago il, i paid $24.99

they are my vendor (acct payable)...where in SQUARE RETAIL do i enter this information

[TCSlaguna]

@artandfiber  The beta lets you view "Default Vendor" in the Item Library. Then you have to export to Excel and filter by "Default Vendor." 

Now, if an item has multiple vendors, the secondary vendor does not show. 

As mentioned before, the logical place to have it is Vendors -> Item Library.
This will make reordering products from a vendor much easier.  

Features to add to Vendors -> Item Library: 

Actions -> Expand All Items

Export to Excel

Current Q

Unit Price

I have emailed @lior about it. Hopefully it is implemented. 

[YNchick]

I am getting ready to switch from QuickBooks POS to Square, but the lack of this feature is making me second guess the move. I can’t believe something as simple as adding that inventory count column to the vendor item library doesn’t exist. 

[TCSlaguna]

Hi Isabel, 

Any word on this: https://www.sellercommunity.com/t5/Questions-How-To/Square-Retail-Can-I-search-for-run-a-report-for-...

Specifically: 

Items -> Inventory Management -> Vendors -> Select Vendor -> Item Library

The ability to view current quantity on hand, and price. 

[isabelle]

Hey @TCSlaguna.

Thanks for following up on this.

I just reached out to our Square for Retail team to see if they're aware of any updates on this feature request. They said that while they can confirm vendor reporting is a highly requested feature that we're developing, they do not have a launch date to release to our sellers. 

I really appreciate your patience with this, and I can assure you that we will post in this thread when this feature becomes available. Let me know if you have any other questions. 

[bearandbird]

I was very surprised to discover just now that I am not able to run any sort of helpful report in Square by vendor! I have a sales rep coming by my shop tomorrow and I assumed this was a basic feature that was available! The vendor has products that span multiple categories, so it will be very easy for me to miss things by just searching categories. This feature needs to be implemented sooner than later, we are paying $60 a month for your POS software! Vendor based inventory reporting is necessary for us  to be able to easily reorder merchandise for our shop. I see there are many requests for this going back many years. Please don't make us fall out of love with Square... this is more important than the company seems to realize in running a small business!

[DiscCrazy]

I am trying to run a report of sales by vendor so I can reorder - how do I run all items and sales for a single vendor in report form?

[Helen]

Hi @DiscCrazy, sorry for this late reply! 

There isn't a way to run a sales/item report by vendor with Square for Retail at this time. I see how that would help you to manage what you need to order and I'll share your request for a report like this with the Retail team. Thanks for letting us know how this would be beneficial to your business! 

[purplebutterfly]

I'd also love to be able to get reports on sales by vendor. Hard to believe it's not there. Even if Vendor was a column in the spreadsheets I can download on transactions I could sort for it myself. 

[Helen]

Thanks for sharing your interest @purplebutterfly! I'll share your request with the Retail team. If it's possible to view sales by vendor in any report will update this thread to let everyone know.

[DAB52]

Hello All...

Is there any update regarding this seemingly easy and common-sense request? I'm a consignment shop (there are tens of thousands out there) that needs this basic ability. I like everything about Square...except this ground ball oversight on their part. I now have to consider cancelling and going to QB.

Please help!

[DiscCrazy]

It is truly unfortunate that square does not offer this, but by all means, going to QuickBooks will do nothing but make your life waaaay more difficult and expensive. There is nothing in QuickBooks POS that works well for a small business.   We started with  QuickBooks POS and they had a vendor report we used (when it wasn’t rife with errors and missing or incorrect data).  Shortly thereafter, even knowing that Square didn’t have a vendor report, we made the move. Our QuickBooks data remains the worst thing that’s happened to our business since we opened. Move to Square was the smart way to go.  We have used the item description field to enter the name of the vendor as the first word (must be exactly replicated on each item)  and can now run a report by vendor by exporting it to excel.  You can catch up to this by running it in Excel, updating the items en mass and then reimporting file back into Square as your item list.  Hope his helps! 🙂

[purplebutterfly]

I just wish Square hadn't put the Vendor field on every item making me think that taking the time to fill in Vendor field for every item would have some value. Hours of wasted time. I have the data in Square but just can't get the data back out. Silly.

Your suggestion for putting the data in another field via a spreadsheet import would be great, but I would have to go into every item in Square to look up which vendor to put in that data field. I have about 8,000 SKUs.

[DiscCrazy]

I agree.   Maybe since you already have filled in the vendor field, you can export item file to Excel and merge those vendor names into the beginning of the description.  I think flash filling it will do it for you. If you Google “how to use flash fill” in excel - sorry if I’m over explaining - it will show you how to do it.  Basically you just do the first 10 or 15 lines and your showing XL two can’t do this“ all the way down.  Then you can just re-import it and overwrite the changes. 

It USUALLY does it automatically after the first 10 or 15 items. 

 Hope this works out for you!

[purplebutterfly]

Boy do I wish that I could export the data via the Catalog export and do what you say. But my point EXACTLY is that they don't include Vendor as a field in any report that I can export to a spreadsheet. How simple life would be if they just added the field VENDOR to any report (Items, Catalog, etc.). My data is locked in their system. 

[DiscCrazy]

oh my gosh - crap - you are right!!  that's so stupid.  I just realized that we had manually used the SKU field to address this by numerically vendor coding orders....sorry!!  This is such a simple thing.  Square needs to step it up!  and soon......there are some new POS cowboys headed out West....QuickBooks is a mess - I started there and for all that is holy, don't do it!!  However, there are other players coming!  I wish you the best of luck!!

[EJ_]

Hi @DAB52 and @purplebutterfly

Thank you for checking back in on this thread. I checked in with our Retail team and there hasn't been much movement around this as of now, but your interest and business needs are a huge help in advocating for this to get re-prioritized. We really appreciate you voicing your opinion around this, as it's a feature that makes sense and would definitely help sellers with their reporting needs. If anything new comes up, I'll chime back in and update everyone. 

@DiscCrazy Thanks for sharing your experiences with Quickbooks, and hopefully we can improve our current offerings so that it becomes exactly what you need in the future. 

[flirtbeauty]

I'm also new to Square and I cannot believe that I cannot download a report of sales by vendor.   This is a serious element missing from Square.  I came from using Lightspeed Retail and I could download every possible kind of sales report on that platform.  You need to fix this or I may be gone before I even get started.

[kellyj]

@flirtbeauty

Thank you for the feedback. We are taking these requests seriously and these are product features that we hope to have in the future. You can read more about how our Feature Requests shape the product updates here. 

[purplebutterfly]

The post you linked in offers a good line:

"We always try to provide a workaround when it makes sense. Even if our products don’t do exactly what you need them to, we want to help you get closer to your goal..."

A really simple workaround would be to add a Vendor field to reports we can already download. The data presumably is in your database, so adding it to a downloadable report should be a simple workaround. No need to build new reports or create an interface to find the data. Just a spreadsheet that has the field and let us have fun with the information we can finally unlock from your database of OUR data.

[bozrahsss]

I just got off the phone with Square support and they verified that there is 100% no way at all to get any kind of report or spreadsheet whatsoever that includes both a vendor name and the amount sold. They told me there is no known manual workaround either.

This data really should be available. I would even be open to any manual workarounds, but can't find any. I could copy the Vendor name into any other field from the item library, but the most detailed report you can download regarding items sold only takes two fields from the actual Items library: Name and Category. It is not feasible to change either of these to the vendor's name, so manually downloading this CSV and sorting it isn't even an option.

[isabelle]

Hey @bozrahsss. Thanks for your post.

Having worked on the Square for Retail phone support team previously, I know how commonly this feature is requested. I realize how frustrating it is to be able to input the name of the vendor for your items, but not be able to export a record or report of it.

This is something the Retail Product team is aware of, and working to make this available for our Square for Retail users in the future. While I don't know when this feature will be available, I know it's on our road map. Thank you for your patience.