This is the most frustrating problem with Square sales reporting IMO—there seems to be no way to modify item categories after the fact and have the reporting show the reclassified sales. It would appear their reporting data is created in some append-only fashion, and they never go back to modify it even if categories change.
I emailed a previous account rep of ours specifically about this issue over 2 years ago (Nov 2015), here's the crux of our conversation quoted below. In short, they "don't yet have this feature" and I haven't seen any evidence that they intend to fix this shortcoming. Of course you could develop your own custom reporting platform using their API, which would be quite a lot of work just to get category reporting to work in the way that customers would expect.
My question to account rep:
"I am trying to sort out an issue we're having with Item Category reporting, wondering if you have any advice.
The categories for our items have sometimes been set incorrectly initially, or we may have otherwise wanted to change the categories after the items were created. However, this does not seem to be affecting our reporting of historical sales for that item, i.e. an item that we changed from category A to category B a month ago still reports category A sales for the same item from 2 months ago.
I just talked to a support rep and he told me that the reporting is actually supposed to work this way, and that there is no way to run a historical category sales report using the current item categories, instead of whatever category the items happened to be in at the time of sale.
This is a really big problem for us because we have hundreds of items, I think, and I don't even see a way to understand what our actual growler sales were, for example, without going through the entire huge item list and adding up individual item totals by hand for items in the category I'm looking for.
We are wondering if there is anything we can do about this problem, short of needing our own developer, and if this is something that has been identified as a problem before?"
Account Rep response:
"I can understand how this would help your business, however, we don't yet have this feature. You could try deleting the item and recreating an item in the correct category instead of moving the item.
We're constantly working to improve our products and services based on the feedback we receive from customers. I'll be sure to share this with the appropriate team."
