selling items not in inventory

[SweetPickins]

We have a lot of dealers in our store. How do we sell their items which are not in the inventory?

[Chad]

Hello @SweetPickins! Quick question, do you have other sellers in your space that use Square and your wondering how you can make sales on their behalf when there not present? I want to make sure I have a good grasp on what you're trying to do before I make any suggestions. 

[SweetPickins]

No. We lease space out to people and all sales come through us. We used to ring them up under a code assigned to them.Now it looks like we have to add all of their items to inventory and place them in a category assigned to that dealer.

[Chad]

I see now @SweetPickins! That's pretty awesome that you lease space out, it kind of reminds me of an art gallery. 

You already mentioned the solution for selling in this fashion, so please let me know if you have any questions. I would be happy to help out! 

[StanG]

Hello Chad and Sweet Pickins, I have this exact same question for the reason that Chad pointed out. We are a nonprofit art center with over 30 separate studios rented to artists. We would like our system to be available for those artists without their own sales system. However the sales far are too unpredictable to create an inventory system so we need to be able to charge for an item that is not in our inventory. This is very important for us. Our current old-fashioned card reader allows this.

Would you please confirm this practice is available through Square and where we can find the directions? (I'll have to train staff and on-call staff). 

I look forward to your response. Thank you,

Stan

[BofBArtStudio]

We do the same thing and we have a couple of buttons / items set up with variable pricing.  When we sell something that is not an inventory, such as a custom item, we utilize this variable item button and enter in the price, and then we add in a note about what it was. That way we can ring up the customer and not have to have these one-off items all entered into inventory.