[AUS] Square Reporting Q&A: Get answers and influence product decisions!

[Ani_]

Happy New Year, Seller Community! ✨

Effective and reliable reporting is crucial for the smooth operation of any business, and we recognize that there is always room for improvement with the reporting tools offered by Square.

Participate in the upcoming Square Reporting Q&A to let the team know what's going well and what can be improved — because who better to provide insight on how to improve these tools than the sellers who use them on a daily basis? 😉

This event is an opportunity to speak directly with @annakepler on the Square Reporting team, and contribute to how developments are prioritized throughout 2023.

On Wednesday, January 25, 2023, she and her team will be here to address any questions you may have, and make sure your experiences are documented with their plans for the year ahead.

Not sure what to ask? Here are some example questions: 

• What is the best way to keep an eye on sales trends for my items?
• If I could do "_________" with reporting in the online Square Dashboard, that would save me so much time.
• How can I manage sales reports across multiple business locations?

Click 'Reply' below to ask your question ahead of time, and we’ll answer every question on Wednesday, January 25, 2023. We're looking forward to hearing from you!

[Ani_]

Happy New Year, Seller Community! ✨

Effective and reliable reporting is crucial for the smooth operation of any business, and we recognize that there is always room for improvement with the reporting tools offered by Square.

Participate in the upcoming Square Reporting Q&A to let the team know what's going well and what can be improved — because who better to provide insight on how to improve these tools than the sellers who use them on a daily basis? 😉

This event is an opportunity to speak directly with @annakepler on the Square Reporting team, and contribute to how developments are prioritized throughout 2023.

On Wednesday, January 25, 2023, she and her team will be here to address any questions you may have, and make sure your experiences are documented with their plans for the year ahead.

Not sure what to ask? Here are some example questions: 

• What is the best way to keep an eye on sales trends for my items?
• If I could do "_________" with reporting in the online Square Dashboard, that would save me so much time.
• How can I manage sales reports across multiple business locations?

Click 'Reply' below to ask your question ahead of time, and we’ll answer every question on Wednesday, January 25, 2023. We're looking forward to hearing from you!

[annakepler]

Thank you for your question @Cookie120362 ! 
Surcharges is our of my expertise, but maybe this article can help https://squareup.com/help/au/en/article/5671-can-i-apply-a-surcharge-to-square-sales. If not you can always reach out to our support. 

[NinaWard]

I've been trying to work out how to have a report that summarises my fund release to my bank account each day into items - eg for me that would be consultations - $$$, test fees - $$$, programs $$$, prescription products - $$$ - for each transfer to my bank account so I can easily enter that into my account software. I am not sure if I am just missing a report like this that already exists or if there isn't one. This would make my life much easier. Thanks for asking this question. 

Nina Ward

Naturopath

Adelaide 

[lawnbrook]

Hi @NinaWard ,

A different business, but I have a similar requirement.

There is a item sales report that will do what you want, but i think a better approach is what I do. I have created categories in square that match my quickbooks accounts that I'm interested in tracking separately. I thnk this pretty much equates to your consult, test fee, programs, presecriptions.

Then the square items are assigned to the appropriate categories.

The sales by category then gives you a nice summary for the time period:

https://squareup.com/dashboard/sales/reports/category-sales

I have a template 'sale' in quickbooks which has blank entries for each of these categories, and additional line for card processing fees

I pull the card processing fees for the period from the card payment method report:

https://squareup.com/dashboard/sales/reports/payment-methods

The final balance of this 'sale' will match the bank deposit minus any cash component.

The breakdown by category within square is flexible enough for me to get a quick dashboard view of my business breakdowns.

There is a square integration (Amaka) which will automate this, but unless you have high volume im not sure its worth the expense.

Bruce

[NinaWard]

Thanks Bruce. I'll take a look at that.

Square, I still think it would be good to have this type of transfer breakdown available as an easy access report. Thanks

Nina Ward 

[annakepler]

Thank you for offering help to community support by sharing your advice! 
highly appreciated. 

[BabyBooPrints]

Hey thanks for the opportunity.

more integrations! 
we need Integration with Australia Post!!

a better integration with Google.

currently this integration is not automatic and the extract sheet need to be manually adjusted in Google merchant when there is price changes or new stock added.

this takes up so much time and creates error. 
would love to hear feedback on this please.

Would also like more

automatic marketing emails created.

New products and new to sale kinda emails.

thank you

Maryanne

BabyBoo Prints 

[BabyBooPrints]

Can I also add another question & idea

i’d love to be able to up sell additional products when a customer is looking at a particular product, for example if a  Customer is looking at buying a towel, on the same screen could there be something that is linked to other products and have ‘Also add matching items’ the matching item might be face washers 

this way it’s making it easier for the customer to not only buy a towel but to buy face washes and essentially instead of selling a $60 item, you’ve now sold $100 

hope that makes sense. There is a huge market for bundling up items at the moment and people are willing to purchase more if it is easier for them to do so

Would love to hear your thoughts on this 

Maryanne 

[JMV10]

For Tax purposes it would be great to be able to see percentages of product category reports:

e.g. Daily sales $1200

Category 1:   $774     62% 

Category 2:   $226    38%  

At the moment the math is slightly more complex and we have to do it manually for several product categories. This would save me heaps of time!

Thanks. Cheers, Jens

[ttelrectangle1]

You guys need to consider the users perspective regarding the fees that are applied to transactions.

I'm not talking about the amount.

I am referring to how the fee is applied.

When we make a sale to a customer we work to a figure that we invoice to the customer with the disclaimer to the customer that if they pay via credit card (using square) that there will be an additional fee of roughly 2%.

To ensure that what appears on our bank statement matches our invoice we have to manually calculate and add the square fee and hope to hell that we get it exactly right to the cent or our whole accounting system is out of balance. The banked amount MUST match the invoice amount.

There is a simple solution that has not been implemented by Square that leaves me dumbfounded why it has not been done.

Even your own tech support staff are baffled why it has not been done as they get asked this quite often.

Solution: Enter our invoice amount into the Square app as the sale price and then square add the fee at the end.

You don't have to hide the fee. Make it obvious to the credit card user that the amount now includes a fee and display it openly.

Presently you force us to calculate the fee in the field with our customer waiting to pay while we fumble with a phone calculator and pray that we get the correct figure so the resultant deposit into our bank account matches our invoice.

This problem is even further problematic when an invoice was generated in our accounting program in a previous BAS quarter and is therefore locked. Then the customer rings up to pay the locked invoice and we cannot adjust our invoice to match the fee.

Its a bloody nightmare and it could be solved so simply by the App adding the fee after we enter our invoice amount.

If you can't do this then you are wasting so many users time.

And believe me, I am actively searching for an alternative to solve this issue outside of the square solution.

If I find it, I WILL be changing.

And while you are at it, please make it so that each sale results in a transfer, not a daily lump sum. 

PS: and how about warning someone who just typed a huge reply only to have it all thrown away when it asks you to log in when you hit reply. And I can only presume that "sellercommunity" is owned by Square because it forced me to link my square account to this.

If it is not, its a brilliant scam because it got me.

[ASAB]

A monthly/quarterly sales, payouts, all transactions, that include fees and such as a summary to help with BAS. If this ia already available could someone help me figure out how? Paypal does one that is amazing. Has all of the details you need in a summary of 2 pages. Im happy to send a copy of mine if that helps!

[lawnbrook]

@ASAB ,

Take a look a the custom reports. it has a lot of what you want I think.

You need to add remove the relevant sections

I think there is going to be more work put into the custom reporting too as its relatively new. The idea is to have reports you can instantly go to  (URL) without having to configure each time.

https://squareup.com/dashboard/sales/reports/builder

[Tom]

Hello everyone!

The time for receiving new questions has closed for this event. Thank you to everyone who asked questions and shared their experiences — we received a lot of helpful feedback!

The Square Reporting team will continue to address your posts as they are able. Due to the high volume of interest across all of our forums, it may take a few days to follow up on remaining inquires. We appreciate your patience and please keep watch for updates throughout the end of the week and early next week. 🙏🏻

[annakepler · Accepted solution]

Hello Everyone,

Thank you to everyone who participated in our Reporting Q&A! We got an overwhelming number of questions and suggestions that we will be iterating on as we continue to improve your reporting experience! We answered as many questions as we can and will continue to get to the rest of them on an ongoing basis. 

To wrap up, here’s a summary of a few themes I saw in the questions:

Improved general reporting functionality

• Many of you have brought up the need to generate comprehensive monthly and yearly statements, as well as the ability to generate statements for your customer or vendors.
  
  
• Flexible time ranges and comparisons against specific dates and times of the week, and further ability to define your custom business week and fiscal year boundaries. 
  
  
• Improved export functionality by fixing existing issues, adding new export formats like Excel and PDF, and the ability to customize and streamline the data export. 
  

These are important features and are high on the priority of our core reporting team. 

Additional features for both Inventory and Appointment reporting

Our teams are working on various new reports and enhancements to existing reports in this product area. The valuable feedback we received during this event tremendously helps our teams to prioritize the work and focus on your needs.
In the meantime, I would like to share that if you have a Retail Plus subscription, you get access to Item Sales by Category through the Cost of Goods Sold report. You can find this report in Dashboard by navigating to the Reports section > Inventory Reports > Cost of Goods Sold. In this report, you can filter items using the Category filter at the top to view your top-performing items based on Quantity Sold, Total Revenue, Profit, etc. 

Square reporting integrations

We have received lots of feedback regarding Quickbooks integrations and what we must improve there to support your needs. Enhancements to Amaka and Google integrations, as well as more integrations in general would be a great value add. 

We appreciate you taking the time to share your experiences and we'll continue to improve Square’s reporting functions based on your business needs.   

We wish you all success and we’ll keep answering your questions here in the Community! For the latest updates, keep watch for announcements of new features in Product Updates.

[kmacmmurchy]

I’m still amazed there is no way to automate reporting. I have 5 stores and doing payroll is painfully slow because I have to run reports manually. I could do this easily on my old 10 year POS no problem. Every 2 weeks it would run payroll and email me pdf reports from each store. I could also do month end sales reports the same way.

This would be useful for every Square user out there.

[Bronsart7_]

Hello,

I have been happy with square so far, (as a TINY business) BUT I had GST taken out for my last sale of $320..??

I am NOT registered for GST in Australia as I will NEVER turn over the required $$ to need to register.

Can I reverse this? 

Is it something in my set up that I can rectify?

Please help as I will not be using Square if this is ongoing.

Thanks Bron (BRONS ART)

[lawnbrook]

@Bronsart7_ ,

It appears you have made your post in the middle of an existing thread, which perhaps was not your intention. Your post may be more visible if you start a new thread.

Having said that, Square does not collect GST, square will take a fee, and their is GST payable on THAT fee.

You need to pay GST on goods and services that you purchase/use if the provider (in this case Square) is registered for GST. In this case though this would only be 10% of the square fee..

If that does not explain what you are seeing, can you please explain what makes you think GST has been taken out.

Regards,

Bruce

[Bronsart7_]

Right ok, Thank you Bruce, that clarifies! 😁 Bron

[JY28]

I am currently using square with xero running our football club.

Does square and xero intergrate into the expense in the chart of accounts when taking payments.  Also which is the cheapest and most convenient way to take payments 

[Laurie_]

Hey there @JY28,

Thanks for taking the time to reach out to us here and welcome to the Seller Community! 🤗

While Square integrates with the Xero platform, this integration is managed by Xero directly. For this reason, any specific questions you have regarding this integration are best directed to Xero's team who have firsthand experience with the platform.

You can visit their Support Centre, or email their team directly at [email protected] for further assistance with your query.

Coming back to your question about processing payments, you can view an overview of Square's card processing fees on this page. Processing fees will vary depending on your subscription level and the hardware you select. 

Start by having a read-through of the linked page above and if you have any further questions about fees or hardware, don't hesitate to reach out to us.