No more pennies for cash sales

DocPopcorn · ‎04-07-2025

I want to stop using pennies in my Square POS over-the-counter sales. This is due to the new national policy to stop minting pennies. I could set my prices to the nearest nickel, dime, or quarter, (which I have done before) but when %discounts are taken into account, there will always be some cash sales that will need pennies for change. We are not going to stop offering % discounts for various good reasons. I want Square Register to have an option to round the change to the nearest nickel, since pennies are going 'obsolete' in the US. My employees could theoretically do this manually, except for 2 reasons: the numbers won't add up at the end of the day (the register count will always be 'off'), and also that you would be surprised how many young people can't do simple math, or perform simple concepts like 'rounding'. Currently, when I apply a percentage discount, the SquareUp POS must already round to the closest penny. That's just math. If they can round to the nearest penny, then it can be made to round to the nearest nickel also.

ncroasters

I also just chatted Square. They said: no I'm sorry unfortunately we don't have a feature that can do that at the moment what I can do is leave this chat as feedback so in feature updates we can add a feature that can do that.

and then said: I understand is just that is not something a lot of merchants have requested so the development team hasn't add a feature for that yet I'm sorry.

So I'm not expecting much help here.

DocPopcorn

Original Poster here:

FYI: I spoke with a representative from our owner company (>$100M in yearly sales) 2 weeks ago.

SquareUp is our designated POS for retail stores, and has been for several years.

He is going to add this to his list of thngs to negotiate with Square about, and to push for changes.

They have been successful in getting SquareUp/Block to do things that they didn't want to do.

I believe Square is only interested right now in additional "AI" type upgrades that they can charge extra $$ for

They are not interested in existing problems that won't make them any additional money--that's probably the barrier we are up against. The last penny was made last week, and even my bank, that has been awesome, can't get any more pennies at all.

The state laws about rounding don't hold any water if there are just no pennies available to give as change.

Donnie-M

@DocPopcorn I wish it was that simple, the real fly in the ointment is that some states have laws AGAINST penny rounding. You can't round down if it would mean charging an EBT customer more, by law they have to be charged the same. Some states if you round down you are making it cheaper for cash customers and charging credit customers more, so that is a surcharge. The opposite is to round everything up, now the states like new york will get you for discriminating against cash paying customers by charging credit card customers less.

Square is in the no win situation, because they are the merchant processor of record. The "Common Cents" act that is pending is the fastest way to get this fixed.

CandyLovers

Until square gets their stuff together and comes up with a rounding option, we have decided we will try this once we run out of pennies:

We will create buttons on the terminal that will be "discount buttons" with either $0.01, $0.02, $0.03, or $0.04 amounts for the discount. So, When the total comes up to $12.52, we will just select the "$0.02" discount button. Hopefully this will work how we want it to and will bring the total down to $12.50. Also, since its a programmed discount, we will be able to track how many times its used.

Conversely, if you don't want to take the hit as the company, you can just create buttons for charging customers the extra cents, and just make sure its not tied to sales tax.

We haven't had to implement this yet, so we are hoping it will work, But in theory, i think it will.

vhovar

Our issue right now is that our bank no longer will take pennies in our deposits. What we have decided to do (until a point where we cannot get new pennies) is to take care of this rounding on a daily basis with our deposit. I round our deposit either up or down. I don't change the drawer close but rather just short or over the drawer by up to $.02 on any given day. While not ideal, it doesn't affect our customers right now and we are not seeing any shortage of pennies so this could go on for a while.

One thing we were concerned about is a customer having issues with their bank taking pennies and them bringing in pennies to pay with. We have put up a sign that we limit the numbers of pennies to $.05 on any transaction. Of course, this is a "soft" restriction, and we would not turn anyone down, within reason.

Maybe the government (and Square) will get this ironed out before we are forced to adjust our tickets on individual transactions.

dripdropcafe

Curious if there's an update on a new feature for this? We need an automatic solution. Rounding down would cost us noticeable revenue, and we want the option to choose whether to pass that cost to customers (round up or round down). Adjusting all our prices to end in $0.xx something to bring bill total to a rounded $0.05 isn’t realistic, we have too many modifiers and specific price points, and our 8.875% tax rate makes menu price changes to bring bill totals to an even $0.05 is unmanageable.