New to Square

[Claudia1999]

Hi there,

My business is new to using square appointments and we have 2 major issues and are awaiting to speak to someone and wondered if anyone could assist sooner through this platform. 

I have listed below the issues we have faced so far: 

1. We require all of clients to pay a 25-50% deposit before their appointment that comes off at checkout. With Square, I've been sending this deposit out as a payment link (externally to Square because we are unable to do any email/texting marketing which I will mention below). And then when the client pays, adding a note to the appointment, for the stylist to deduct it at checkout. 

Separately to this, our stylists have set targets and commission that is based on how much income they make. If they were to check out their appointments with the deposit deducted, this wouldn't be an accurate statistic of how much they've made because that deposit figure is missing. How can we make the payment link associated with the appointment? How do your other salons tackle this? 

Because we've been unsure of this since we started, we have instructed the stylists to just use the keypad on the terminal (thinking we would get sorted sooner than now). Because of this, no appointments have actually been checked out so we have no data for this month so far. 

2. When we imported our customer list, the marketing column wasn't acknowledged so nobody was signed up to email marketing. I spoke to someone about this issue and he said I can manually upload the client list straight into marketing. So I sat and created a list of only people who opted-in and used the Square template, imported into marketing and it still acknowledged none of the clients so we have a marketing customer list of 0. January is the quietest month of the year for us so the fact we've been unable to do any marketing efforts, is detrimental to our revenue. 

[Sineaid · Accepted solution]

Hi @Claudia1999, thanks for your post, and welcome to the Community!

At this time there isn't a way to take a deposit using a payment link and record it against an Appointment. It's also not possible to split the transaction into multiple payments at different times.

The ability to collect deposits with Square for Appointments is a long standing feature request, which you can get behind and track here.

You can however set up a custom cancellation and no-show protection policy, and require clients to add a payment card to complete their online booking. If your customer violates your cancellation policy, you'll be able to charge their card. To set up a no-show policy from your Square Dashboard :

1. from your Square Dashboard go to Appointments > Settings > Payments & Cancellations.
2. Under Payments, select Hold card for no-show protection > Next.
3. Under Payments, select Hold card in case of no-show > Next.
4. Click the Fee type drop-down menu and select Flat fee per appointment.
5. Enter the fee amount.
6. Click Save.

You'll also find more information in this support article: Manage Booking Cancellations and Prepayment Policies. 

I understand that with these limitations, the features available through Square Appointments may not suit all of your business needs. So, I suggest taking a look at third-party integrations available on our App Marketplace. It looks like Acuity Scheduling offers the ability to collect deposits. 

With regards to updating your marketing list and Directory, can I first just check that the relevant field on the template has been updated correctly? On the Square template you’ve used, the fields in the column titled Email Subscription Status should be populated with: Subscribed, Unsubscribed or Unknown. I’ve seen instances in the past where Yes/No has been entered, which has resulted in the customers opt-in preferences not being updated accurately.