A more useful search function for invoices and product/service items

[Sash_015]

Summary

Square’s search only supports single, exact keywords, making it slow to find multiple invoices or cross-reference products. Advanced search with operators like AND, OR, NOT, and wildcards would let users find everything they need in one query. This would save time, reduce admin work, and make Square a stronger all-in-one business platform.

User interface considerations

Advanced search strings are typically invisible for anyone who does not know how to use them. This can be remedied with a little icon next to the search bar or some such, which when hovered over gives a small summary. Maybe "bulk invoice search with & , ! - +", or a button that says "advanced search" next to the date filter button, that sends the user to a support page teaching them how to use advanced search strings.

Advanced search strings would be most useful if included in the normal search bar. Having a separate section, bar, page, so on, for advanced search, would create needless extra steps, which would defeat the purpose of making finding things more simple.

Back-end considerations

This isn't purely a back-end consideration as it directly effects how the user interacts with the system, but search modifiers should be the same as modifiers that already exist in other apps and websites, rather than inventing a set of modifiers that only work in Square. For example, virtually all users who would use advanced search without a tutorial know that ',' means 'or', so it's intuitive that searching for two invoices separated by a ',' will have those two invoices show up. The same applies to '!', '=', '&', '-', and '*', and their respective functions.

These symbol modifiers are used in software as ubiquitous as Microsoft Office, and even in games like Pokemon Go. Users already know how to use them. It would make little sense to try to reinvent the wheel.

Real world use cases

1.      Looking through pay statements for my cleaning company and marking invoices as paid, I frequently get statements featuring information from invoices of many clients at one time. If square supported it, I'd be able to search for "0542-R-0026,0515-R-0040,0515-R-0039,0542-R-0027,0661-R-0042", and mark those invoices as paid, in bulk, quickly and at one time.

Since square doesn't support that however, I spend time searching for each invoice and marking as paid, one by one. With dozens and dozens of clients, this eats up valuable time that could be spent elsewhere. Square automatically marks invoices as paid if clients use the card-enabled payment service linked to in the invoice, which I do use for private clients who pay out of pocket, but government and large company clients do not pay this way, so it must be done manually.

2.      When searching for product SKUs that contain certain certain variations, from certain vendors, with certain modifiers, at certain costs, so on, it will be very useful to be able to narrow down and find the exact product we need (for example in the event of a product recall).

3.      Looking for invoices from customers who bought a certain combination of product SKU - something I have experienced in the past. Right now, we would have to search for each SKU individually and then cross-reference to narrow down the relevant customers. With search strings, we could simply search 'SKU-A,SKU-B,SKU-C' and all invoices on which all 3 of those SKUs appear will be shown. Suppose we wanted all customers who bought SKU-A but not SKU-C; this would be as simple as 'SKU-A,!SKU-C'. In this case, all SKU-A buyers will show up, with the SKU-C buyers filtered out.

Benefits

Square is for more than just a small mom-and-pop store with 3 employees and 100 customers per week - it is a serious all-in-one business management platform. Adding advanced search modifiers reduces administration bottlenecks for users, and shows users that Square exists for power users and complex large institutions, as well as for self-employed individuals who just need an easy way to automate a dozen invoices. This will show users that Square can scale with their business and remain useful no matter their size or needs.

Showing users that Square is serious about adding features for power users and businesses with complex workflows will contribute to higher user retention and therefore lower churn - which is a problem for any business. Old users will leave and new users will join by retaining old users while gaining new users by offering more advanced features will be a win-win for everyone.

It seems like new users come from an infinite pool, but churn is a real issue for organisations of any size - Amazon is currently facing a reality wherein most people who can or want to work in their fulfillment warehouses already have, and so their hiring pool is shrinking every day. They will have to bet big on automation to continue normal operations in the not-too-distant future, which may or may not be able to complete all of their currently human-led tasks.

Why take the same risk with Square? Adding new features shows that the platform is improving, boosting user retention, which will therefore decrease user churn. User acquisition is not free, so it makes sense to keep them around.

Possible issues

This is a purely additive feature that can be ignored by anyone who doesn't want/need to engage with it. As it will be built into the existing invoice search bar, a user who doesn't want to use search strings can simply continue working as normal, with zero change to workflow.

Note

I got the "Your post has been changed because invalid HTML was found in the message body." error message but can not find the changes that were made. If anything is unclear, let me know, I will reply in this thread and clarify directly.