Square Reporting Q&A: Get answers and influence product decisions!

[Tom]

Happy New Year, Seller Community! ✨

Effective and reliable reporting is crucial for the smooth operation of any business, and we recognize that there is always room for improvement with the reporting tools offered by Square.

This event was an opportunity to speak directly with @annakepler on the Square Reporting team, and contribute to how developments are prioritized throughout 2023.

On Wednesday, January 25, 2023 we hosted a Q&A to address questions and make sure your experiences are documented with the Reporting team's plans for the year ahead.

Not sure what to ask? Here are some example questions: 

• What is the best way to keep an eye on sales trends for my items?
• If I could do "_________" with reporting in the online Square Dashboard, that would save me so much time.
• How can I manage sales reports across multiple business locations?

[chada]

It sounds like you want to be able to report by Notes at aggregate? Can you help me understand what you are putting in the notes.

Fo the question “What did I sell today”, mobile version, have you checked out are Dashboard app? https://squareup.com/help/us/en/article/5618-get-started-with-the-square-dashboard-app

[Jask99]

My items represent booth numbers. So item B7 is Booth 7. we touch B7 and enter a variable amount for everything we sell for Booth 7. So for example if you find a lamp for 9.99 in Booth 7. I will touch B7 on the POS grid-- type in 9.99 and then scroll down to Notes and type in lamp. 

in square reports I can see the total amount we sold for B7 for the day but because we can't see the Notes easily I have no idea what actually sold without downloading the detailed transaction report or going into transactions one by one

at the end of the month I will download the detailed transaction report... throw it in google sheets and slice and dice with formulas so I can give statements to my Booth vendors

maybe even allowing notes as an option in custom reports would be great. 

[BAOR]

It would be beneficial to be able to print a detailed statement for Funds available for Transfer to our bank account as supporting documentation.  It should include a starting balance as of the beginning date of the report and show sales less fees for the date range, less any transfers already drawn during the date range and the resulting available funds balance at the end of the date range.  Those of us that work with Accountants need something akin to a bank statement for our records.  Thank you for your consideration.  

[Candlestore]

Printed Receipt -

Anyway to put the Cash and Credit card transaction on one receipt ?

The Digital Receipt I can see online in Transactions when I click the Transaction that is split shows 1 receipt with 2 smaller receipts for each transaction.   Could this be made into a question for when the receipts get printed (1 receipt or 1 Receipt for each payment method).

I know sometimes at Restaurants people want separate checks and can understand the Split receipts, but I usually have a customer that pays with cash and with a credit card, and they want one receipt not the two.

[JillinWy]

I would like my reports broken down as product sales-taxes charged- and square fees. Totals for dailies as well as being able to consolidate a time frames.

it causes me extra bookwork when I do my quarterlies

[chada]

Thanks for this feedback. Which reports do you then use to get the detail you need? Feel free to DM with your process.

[caphoto]

It would be great if you could add a way to post date a cash transaction. Sometimes I forget to log it / send receipt right away when it's cash and then when I do send it, I can't change the date of the transaction to a previous date.

[AlliedVentures]

Hello all,

Been using Square now for several years. Actually have no complaints about ease of use for mobile or PC. I have only one request, for an additional feature, that would make my sales and business run much smoother. I do a lot of owner-financing on real estate. I'm asked all the time where can they make an additional payment towards their principal payoff. If Square could create an option where I could put the total amount of their contract and allow customers to make additional payments, all my problems are solved. As of now, when a customer wants to do an additional payment, I have to go in and recalculate the remaining balance or refigure their entire monthly recurring. If your system could recalculate a remaining balance, keep the current monthly billing price and reduce the remaining payments when an extra payment is made, I'd never have a reason to look for another solution. 

I need that particular function to make my entire business model flow effortlessly. I could spend way less time getting calls from customers asking to make an extra payment, what their remaining balance is on their contracts or they want to pay off the balance and I have to cancel recurring series and create a new final invoice. That's the one and only item that I hope Square creates. Thanks!

[tap1495]

Hi,

We need a report that we can pull for all orders due by fulfillment date. I haven’t found a report that provides this information so we can pull what orders are due on a daily basis. 
For example we will presell an item for a holiday but we have to manually track how many are due over the course of our fulfillment days. I am currently selling King Cakes that can be fulfilled now until 2/21, there is no report that will tell me how many need to be full filled on any given day. So I literally track it on a spreadsheet by tick marking as the orders come in for each day. There should be a report that pulls this information for us so we don’t have to manually track it.

[hud_al]

We use square heavily for invoices. The reporting in this area is greatly lacking!

I would really like to be able to report on invoice PAID within a given month. I can pull a report or list of invoices created but not paid.

A report on invoices for a specific client or by a specific amount would also be helpful. Really if we could just get the ability to report on invoices paid we could then filter on amount or client, etc.

[jael]

We would like to be able to 1) save a credit card number for an open tab so we can charge out at the end of the night.  2).  have time stamps on open tabs so you can see when a tab was started, added to, closed, etc....Maybe a searchable item on teh transaction as to whether a charge was a tab or a single unsaved sale.  

In terms of reports, a drawer report with tax collected on cash sales would be helpful as would the ability to compare time periods (this year to last, etc...) on any sales report.

Finally, I hate whatever the newest square sync to Quickbooks is.  The Sync function has progressively become less functional and more time-consuming since I started with this system 5 years ago.  Furthermore, no one at Square or QB seems to be expert at the syncing functions so both help teams try to pass me off the other every time I have a problem.   It is the only thing that has seriously made me consider switching from square to another platform. 

[Leashless]

How come our payroll schedule has to be the same as the work schedule in order for importing wages into Square Payroll? Most employees think of their work schedule in terms of Monday through Sunday, while most are use to getting paid every other Friday. The two cycles are not the same, yet only with you Square do they need to be in order to have shift data imported into Square Payroll. A data point is a data point, so the two schedules should not have to be the same in order for the correct payroll data based on hours worked to be imported.

[SavoryFM]

It would help me a lot if when I run a sales report by item, I could see the names of the customers for that item without having to export a detailed report to a CSV file. I run farmers markets and most of my items are booth fees for specific events. Prior to each event I run a report to see which vendors have pre-paid so I know who I need to follow up with for payment at the market. Currently when I run an item sales report it shows me how many of that item I sold but in order to figure out who the customers for that item were, I have to export it to CSV, save the file, find the names, and then match them up with my vendor roster. For me it's extra unnecessary steps that take up time. 

[annakepler]

Thank you for sharing @SavoryFM ! This is a really helpful insight into your operations and needs. I will take it back to the team to see how we can make the experience easier. 

[Amyeichlerart]

I would love for the Sales Tax Report to accurately separate and report the sales tax collected in a way that is useful for business and remitting sales tax.  This would be by CITY/COUNTY/STATE instead of only reporting the total for the STATE.  Obviously sales tax that is manually input for in-person/invoice sales is correct in the report, but ALL ONLINE sales are reported lumped together by state vs. the destination of the shipment.  This leaves us manually calculating what needs to be remitted in sales tax each month by running Order Reports and cross referencing the shipping address for each individual sale.  Any progress with this over the past couple years?

[divyar]

Thank you for the feedback. This is a priority roadmap item and we are actively working on improving the reporting experience to make filing easier for our Omni channel sellers such as you. I would like to connect with you for a short chat to learn more about this use case. Please DM me if you are open for a quick call.

[360Farms]

It would make reconciling payments so much easier if we had access to detailed daily transactions reports. We recently changed from a Word Press site to a WIX site.  We are no longer able to access detailed daily transaction reports. All transactions are listed as a custom item with no item description, category, etc... information.

[thirdspace1]

Is it possible to add more functionality for reporting customer data? For example, I would like to be able to:

1) See # of customer visits in a month or year or for specific days of the week. i.e. what is my average number of customer visits on Saturdays? 

2) I would like an easy way to see average sales per transaction and average sales per customer or customer visit

3) I would like to be able to create a group of customers (specifically my membership club) and be able to track sales data for that group to see if members spend more than average customers or if they tend to visit more on specific days. 

[annakepler]

Definitely! Appreciate you sharing these requests. As the team is investigating improvements to customer reporting, would you be open to holding a call with the team to learn more?

[Franco]

The Dashboard app is an amazing tool that we rely on heavily, so thank you for that capability.  I would enjoy the ability to be able to select a particular (or any) period (say January 2nd to January 8th) and be able to compare it to the same period/days in the prior year or any other prior period.  Currently, the app only permits the capability to compare a specific day to one week ago, 4 weeks ago, 52 weeks ago and one year ago.  It's very convenient to know how much revenue we did for any custom period but it's more useful to be able to compare the revenue to the same exact period/days last year.  Thank you.

[annakepler]

Thank you for the feedback @Franco ! We are working on adding custom comparison ranges. I will take your use case back to the team. Stay tuned!