thread Re: Catergory - Uncategorized donations in Payments Troubleshooting

Catergory - Uncategorized donations

galleryplayers — Sat, 20 Sep 2025 07:29:48 GMT

I am with a nonprofit theater and Square is the main way we collection donations via credit card. People can add a donation online through our store when buying tickets or subscriptions, or they can scan a QR code to make a donation through a quick checkout link.

My problem is that I don't see a way to get the donation transactions to fit under a category for ease of reporting.

"Itemization Type" correctly identifies them as a donation (but only if they're made online through the store and not through a checkout link), but "Category" says "None" for all donations no matter how they were made. So any time I pull reports that group all transactions by category, I have everything neatly sorted by the categories I've made except for donations and one other item where customers can choose the amount to pay (items from concessions) - they're always showing as "Uncategorized." It drives me up the wall and I would love to see a fix for this.

Oddly enough, just one transaction managed to fall into my created "Donations" category, and it was one transaction made through the store that was a customized amount. So it's almost worse, as I have 99% of my donations listed as Uncategorized and just 1 random donation listed as Donation.

Help?

Re: Catergory - Uncategorized donations

Candlestore — Tue, 30 Jul 2024 18:59:27 GMT

@galleryplayers

So when Creating a new dontaion you were able to create or choose Type of Donation. That is great I was wondering what the Type was for since all mine are Items.

So when creating a Donation in your Square Dashboard, you should see a little lower Category. Since none of the Current choices there seem to fit, you need to create categories.

Here is more about categories : 8024-create-and-manage-item-categories

In your Square Dashboard go to Items > Categories then create category.

Problem is what ever you choose as a Parent Category will be the reporting category.

So if you create Category Donations

and Child categories as :

Tickets
Subscriptions
Dollar amount

All three of these would only show as Donations for the category

You would need the Bulleted Categories as a Parent Category or Reporting category. If you did that then those 3 bullets would show as the Reported Category.

So when Creating your Ticket Donation you would choose Category of Ticket for the Category.

Look at your Catelog and look for that one Odd item that Fell into your Donations Category. They way that one is created should be similar to how the other donations categories should be setup also.

Anything that shows as Uncategorized is just that, they are not in a category.

So say you sold a Ticket. The Item Ticket may not have a Selected category. If you add a Category to that Item Ticket, then all future donations will show as Category Ticket. You may need to have this as Ticket Donation for the Category Name and have as category Ticket Donation as the Parent / Reporting category and not have the Parent Child Categories as I showed above.

Re: Catergory - Uncategorized donations

galleryplayers — Tue, 30 Jul 2024 19:35:13 GMT

It just seems like my items that are considered donations, where the amount is variable or entered by customer, just don't get categorized, even when I've definitely added a category to the item.

Perhaps there is a chance that I recently added the categories to items within the past month and just forgot, but haven't yet had anyone make a donation so I can't see it in the tracking, but I'm pretty sure I tried to address this awhile ago.

That one lone transaction that was correctly categorized is surrounded by Uncategorized transactions before and after, and the only anomaly was that someone entered a specific donation amount instead of selecting from suggested prefilled amounts. Doesn't make any sense to me!

Honestly, if we could just edit categories after a transaction has been made, I'd be happy enough and call it a day, but it doesn't seem like that will ever happen.

Re: Catergory - Uncategorized donations

Candlestore — Tue, 30 Jul 2024 20:43:20 GMT

@galleryplayers

Correct, once a Transaction is completed you can not edit it. Item name, who sold it, or the Category of the sale. this is because it was completed and recorded and effects reports. So Square does not allow editting of a previous transaction. Just make sure that your others show a Parent or Reporting Category and do a cash test. For Notes on a refund I always put Testing newly created Item category or whatever the reason for the test. I do this with cash since Square no longer refunds the processing fee. So after makeing the donation you can check your sales report to see if that Donation was in the correct category. Put a low amount in to test like 1 cent for example, lol Easy to see and rember it was a test if bookkeeper or account ask about it. That way you can test these before a customer tries it and you get incorrect reporting.