How do I enter the cost of the event into square so that it shows on the report

[Artbyimpression]

I'm new to square and vending in general. I would like to list the cost of the event that I participate in so I can keep track of all of those expenses

[ReverendMike]

Go to ITEMS and create a new item named EVENT. Then, go to VARIATIONS and create an item named whatever you want, or use OFF-SITE EVENT. Then, go to STOCK ON HAND. RECEIVE an 1 unit and enter the fee under UNIT COST. You do this each time you pay for event fees. 

Then, create a sale for one unit of the OFF-SITE EVENT. Tender the sale for ZERO dollars. 

You’ll have all the necessary info to keep track of your fees. 

(You can use the EVENT name instead of OFF-SITE EVENT, but you’ll end up tracking a lot of unnecessary inventory as a result as you add more and more events by name.)

[Fibernatic]

When completing the sale (as above) you could use the "note" field for the specific event name. Then your report will show all the "Off Site Event" Items and each item will show what event.

[ReverendMike]

The only issue with using NOTES is that you can’t sort based on that data. However, a report that displays that CATEGORY isn’t going to be that long, so manual review won’t be that hard.

[JohnPugh]

That’s exactly how I would do it. Creating a bunch of items for events is just asking for problems down the road. Even on our busiest vending / popup years, we rarely did more than 40 different events. That’d be cake to pull a category report on. 

That said, we always keep (or try to at least) a running google sheet going with the event, vending fee, staff hours, staff payment, misc notes, etc going so we can do a check from year to year to see what’s working for us. 

[Fibernatic]

Yes you can.

If you download the "detail" report then save it in excel format, you can then sort it on the item field and the notes field. You can then cut and paste the specific item your wanting to track into another sheet and keep compiling the data for a yearly report or however you want to track a specific item. Since it is a simple excel file, we delete all the unwanted fields we never use like transaction and payment ID fields and so on, or you could just hide the fields you dont want so it is a much more managable set of data. Make a mistake? Just down load it again and start over. We use it all the time this way.