How to set up a vendor and whole sale system.

[FrankiesGift]

Hi, so I need help figuring out what the best way to set up. The Square system is for my gift shop. I want to make the most out of my retail plus subscription for my gift gift shop called Frankie’s in Wisconsin. We have 80 local vendors selling their handmade goods and we have independently published authors, who are all local to our state. All of the authors and makers have vendor number. makers all begin with 1, and range from 100-180. Authors are 200-230.

Additionally the store brings in about 40% of the stores inventory via wholesale. We would enter all store sales in as vendor #99. I am wondering what the best way is to set up our retail plus subscription to make use of the wholesale vendor benefits, in addition to tracking the makers and authors who are all on commission sales.

For additional context for the last 1.5 years we used a system, called SwipeSimple and just put everything through as quick items.But with this method, we had to enter all sales into a spreadsheet by hand and then make an individual workbook for each and every single vendor and send those by hand as well, which is very very time-consuming. We are just moving over to Square now. it seems great but unsure how to go about setting up commission and wholesale vendor sales. Thank you so much for any help you were able to offer!!!!  

[Candlestore]

@FrankiesGift ;

To start with I would create Categories based on Makers (Vendors) and Authors.  So Categories like Maker 100, Maker 101 etc and Author 200, Author 201 etc.  You could even do Maker 103 Bobs Soaps for the categor or use Bobs Business name if you prefer.  This way you can filter out Sales Report by Category (Maker or Author).   Then all Items of soap Bob makes goes into the category Maker 103 Bobs Soaps.  You have the Category 103 Bobs Soaps as a Reporting category and repeat the process for each maker and author.

I would try to avoid using Vendor as Square uses Vendor as a name for Your suppliers you purchase your inventory to resell.  

Now if Bobs Soaps has their Items as a csv you can export your Square catalog as a csv.  Then sort by Category to copy a line of Bobs Soaps.  Paste the Header row and the Copied line in a new csv for Bobs Soaps and have Bobs Soaps place their items in the csv for you to upload to your Square for Retail account.  Repeat this for all Makers and Authors so their items get into your Square account instead of just having generic items for each Maker Author.   If your Makers and Authors do not have a SKU, Square can make SKUs for items without any for you.  Then using the SKU and a scanner you can scan the item when you sell it for them and it will appear in their sales.  If they are selling items with a GTIN barcode already, you can use that number in the GTIN field also aslong as only one maker author is selling the item.  2 of the same GTIN could be a problem but you could print out the SKU for that item to scn to get the correct Maker author.

Now to get you monthly sales reports for each Maker you can view these in Square.  Depending how many Items you may want to export the Items Detail csv for the time frame, Sort by Category and total every thing for that Maker or Author like you did before.  OR if you have excel you could setup a Power Query to automatically do these for you or create a Pivot table based on Category.  This may take time to learn and setup but once it is made, and you learn how to use it effeciently it will save you a ton of time.  I am not sure if you can save a csv of a certain category of sales for a time period.  I do know Square came up with filters you can use in your Reports to download based on filters.  I just made my own Power Query reports in excel and download my Square csv that I click Refresh in Excel wait a minute and they are all made for me.  

You may want to look at your Square Dashboard Reports - Item Sales  Then choose filter by Category, then you get a new popup where you can choose each Maker or author and save the report as csv.   The only thing I see missing is Sales tax when viewing on the screen.   But when I click on the Item I get a nice report with the Item number sold and the sales tax.  You would just need to do this each time period because I am not sure if you can create these as a Custom Report in Squares Dashboard.

You are also asking how to setup Wholesale.  Are you referring to buying at wholesale or selling at wholesale?  With buying at wholesale you just need to Name the vendor as who your buying from and then fill in your actual cost.  

If your trying to sell in bulk as a wholesaler to other businesses with no taxes, that is an issue that does not automatically happen in Square.  I ring up my sales at my POS and if one of my Wholesalers purchases from me, I just slide the Tax to off and proceed.  I associate their company name to the order and have their Business liscense on file so its easy to show in case of an audit.