thread Re: Most of my categories suddenly missing in Payments Troubleshooting

Most of my categories suddenly missing

DB08 — Sat, 20 Sep 2025 07:25:41 GMT

Last week I added a bunch of categories (maybe 30 or so) and set up the hierarchies, etc and then Friday logged in and most of them are gone. Anyone else experience this?

Super frustrating and I'm afraid to add them back in just to see them deleted again. Questioning if Square is the right platform now tbh. Are things pretty buggy here??

Re: Most of my categories suddenly missing

Candlestore — Mon, 19 Aug 2024 21:27:48 GMT

@DB08 ;

I have been with Square since 2019 and have not had my categories disappear. Where or how did you add the categories? Also in your Square Dashboard under Items - Categories are they gone there also? Did you add an item to the category?

I am just trying to understand this.

I do most of my Items through a CSV upload. Try downloading your Square Catalog and enter your categories in Column G - Category, for your csv file.... the column letter might bedifferent if you use Excel. But Category would be the header of the column. By doing it this way there are a few benefits:

It is Faster to put items in (once you do this a few times)
You can easily upload this again if something does happen like Categories Disappearing again
You assign the items to a Reporting category and Create the category during the upload

Re: Most of my categories suddenly missing

DB08 — Mon, 19 Aug 2024 22:13:06 GMT

Thanks, and I'm glad it's not a common occurrence. All I did was add the categories and set up the hierarchy through the dashboard (not the store--I understand they recently merged these functions anyway). Came back a couple days later and all the categories were gone.

And yes I did try importing the item database via the csv. That was frustrating since it only seems to support a single category. There is a column in the template called "additional categories" but no amount of testing showed that this did anything.

FWIW I have 20+ years experience as a front and back-end web dev. The last site we used was a custom LAMP stack site I built from scratch. Lots I don't know, but just saying I'm new to square but not web dev. My only guess is that something about doing the import borked the categories. I definitely didn't go in and delete them.

Re: Most of my categories suddenly missing

Candlestore — Mon, 19 Aug 2024 23:10:27 GMT

@DB08

The additional categories field may have been premature by the team at Square as I saw another user post about this but I have not been able to down load a catalog from Square with that field. I think the additional categories field is for Non Reporting categories or sub categories but can not confirm nor deny this as these would be NEW columns to the Square catalog and a new feature Square is working on.

I never added all my Categories and then came back to add new items later into the categories. As I added Items I would create a category for the item to go into or in the csv file I created the category in the category field only. I am wondering since you created the Categories but there were no Items in it at any point in time yet if that is why they got deleted. An item does not need a category but I wonder if a Category needs an Item. If that makes sense?

I think Squares Catalog contains Items and Categories since I can not just download my categories csv. The catalog needs and Item to hold the cell for categories I am guessing.

Re: Most of my categories suddenly missing

mlgaspar — Fri, 11 Oct 2024 01:48:16 GMT

Any luck getting your categories back? I've got over 300 missing for the last month and they are working on a solution.