[New] Create an Open Order with Virtual Terminal

[#1]

Hi Sellers! 👋

We’re excited to announce that you can now create Open Orders using Virtual Terminal. 

This new feature enables you to effortlessly create orders in Virtual Terminal, schedule a pickup time, manage and edit your unpaid orders in Dashboard, and process payments upfront or upon pickup. 

Why use Open Orders?

• Get the flexibility to create pickup orders that can be paid at a later date while you fulfill and manage them
• Offer a quick and easy checkout to your customers by pulling up existing orders upon pickup 
• Easily manage orders with long lead times by scheduling them in Order Manager 

How to get started:

1. From the Dashboard Order Manager select “Create Order” to begin creating an order in Virtual Terminal with a customer and a pickup time you schedule for the future
   
   
2. Or navigate directly to Virtual Terminal from Dashboard and create an order there through the “Take Payment” action
   
   
3. Select “Create Order” when all line item, customer and pickup details are entered
4. Find and manage your orders in Order Manager and open them up in Virtual Terminal through the “Edit & Pay” button to edit order details or pickup information prior to taking payment
   
   

Whether you accept pickup orders by phone, offer service or repair jobs that take an extended amount of time, build custom products, or just need to park a sale temporarily, Open Orders helps you stay organized and provides a seamless checkout experience for your customers. 

Read up more on the feature in this help article to get started today. Please leave any comments or questions you have about this feature!

[Donnie-M]

@tranguyen Do you know yet if these open orders are going to be integrated into open tickets in the point of sale or only currently in the order manager?  I love the direction of moving these open tickets/open orders into a unified interface you can access anywhere.

[tranguyen]

Hey @Donnie-M, I'm not sure actually but have reached out to a member of the Product team who worked on this feature. I'll let you know as soon as I have an update! 

[HodgePodge]

This already looks such a cool and useful feature! I have been testing it out for a use case on our end and here are a few things I noticed (some bugs, some less than desirable features for my specific use case):

BUG - If you choose a customer (in this case they had multiple payment cards on file), then choose a payment method OTHER than card on file (our testing was with send payment link) and THEN choose make this recurring, you do not get a message that tells you that recurring payments are only available with a card on file, therefore it appears that you can send them a link to pay and after that it will become a recurring payment (invoice) however it does not. The only time we got the pop up with that info was when we chose the reoccurrence then tried to choose a different payment method. The pop-up should show no matter what order you perform those actions, and it might be nice to also include a blurb about how the feature is only for card on file after the "Automatically charge your customers on a regular basis for this amount". 

BUG or feature? - When we set a tip amount then made it a recurring payment (invoice) with a card on file, the next scheduled invoice did NOT contain the tip. Our charge with tip for the first order was $2.11 plus $1 tip - total $3.11. The next recurring invoice (set for weekly) only shows $2.11, no tip. If someone tips and it's set for recurring I think it's fair to assume the tip is also recurring, but maybe that should be a question they need to answer? Not totally sure how to handle that ethically honestly. 

Feature (that we don't love) or maybe a bug - we use a KDS (set up like a printer though, we don't have Square Restaurants, just POS) and we have our settings for online orders set to a prep time of 5 minutes and the tickets/KDS to populate that 5 minutes before it's supposed to be picked up. We wanted to test if we used this open orders with virtual terminal feature and chose a fulfillment half an hour from now if it would show up appropriately on the KDS 5 minutes before the order is expected, or if it would show up immediately. Unfortunately it showed up for us immediately. We thought by choosing the fulfillment time in the future it would work on the back end similar to an online order set in the future. 

Feature we don't love (or so it appears, we're still doing longer-term testing): our use case that we were excited to use this particular feature for is our program called Daily Sips. It's for people who want the same coffee order on a regular basis. We currently just use recurring invoices for payments and a spreadsheet outside of Square for prep. We've been looking for ways to get our KDS (printer) to display the invoice orders 5-10 minutes before the expected fulfillment time (partner is a developer so we were planning to write something of our own until we saw this feature come along!). We tested out using this open orders with virtual terminal for it and set up recurring series through it, however only the first order shows on the open orders, then obviously the rest is handled through invoices (which is already how we handle the recurring payments). We were hopeful that an order would ALSO be scheduled on a recurring basis so it will show up on the KDS for our employees but it doesn't look like that is the case unfortunately 😞 

Would LOVE to chat more with y'all about this!

[ScottHern]

Any plans to add invoicing as a payment option?  We typically do large orders during the holidays that we invoice and track in a separate system.  I think we could switch over to this if we could use invoicing.

Otherwise, thanks for adding this

[nella]

How do we add shipping as a fulfillment method for open orders in Virtual
Terminal? If this is not possible, then this post is a feature request; and, what is best practice for creating orders for a customer on his behalf that includes shipping as a fulfillment method? In POS, or Online, or

something else? We would like it to be in Online but it seems there's no way to create an Online order on behalf of a customer. Is that correct? And in Invoices there's no fulfilment methods built into it at all nor any way of managing shipments.

[nateyandbode]

I've been looking for and requesting a way to integrate online + in-person orders to one order queue. This looks like it is the closest solution yet, but it doesn't have an option to fulfill the order by shipping. Am I looking in the wrong place or is that a feature request?