Do we have to turn on employee management to associate an employee with a transaction?

[gkustas]

I'm fairly new to Square. I have been able to get by with the limitations I've encountered so far, but this could be a show stopper for us. We have a very small cafe, but over the course of the summer, we have several employees all working part time. If we have to activate 4-5 employees just to get an employee id associated with a sale transaction, that is going to be costly. I suggest that you add the ability to create employees for no other purpose than sales transactions so that we can print their name on the receipt and keep track of tips for each employee. Even if you just add a custom field or another named note field! We don't care about payroll, permissions, time reporting, any of that stuff. We just need to know which employee made the sale. For tip distribution, and employee accountability (in case of a customer reported problem). Can this be done now, yes or no please? If not, is there a plan to do so?

[Sean]

@gkustas - Welcome to Square and the Seller Community. We're happy to have you! 👐🏻

As for your question, you would need to create employee accounts if you wanted to track individual employee sales. While you could certainly add an employee name to the notes field, or create a modifier set to apply to each item that consists of the employee names, it would be extremely manual to review these details. One more important feature to note about Employee Management is the ability to customize the levels of access. You could prevent employees from accessing all of the business details, as well as preventing types of actions (like refunds). 

While I know this isn't the answer you want, I do hope that this helps! 

[gkustas]

I appreciate your answer. I regret that we won't be going forward with Square. It was very tempting given the "per swipe pricing", but it just won't work for us. This isn't our only issue, as you can see from my other posts. Not being able to cancel a transaction and not having better control of our customer list are other areas of concern. I found these three issues while working extensively over the weekend to evaluate your software. Perhaps our business isn't a good fit. We are a non-profit that services our members at the bar year around, and a cafe in the summer. We also rent our facility to the public and do a cash/credit bar business. I know we are not an unusual type of business, so it may be worth your while to consider it. If I compare you to Toast, Bistro, Revel and others, you are less expensive for us because we don't do credit exclusively. But we need more functionality for our membership business (which you don't make any money on of course). Still, I think you have a good shot at this market if you adapt to restaurants and clubs. Just my advice to a fellow software company (I have a cloud based solution too). I wish you and your business good luck.