Help - Restaurant & Bar Setup on Square

[plymouthhotelca]

Hello Square Community! I've been using Square POS for 8 years, and the new updates have completely thrown off my staff and me, and I'm trying to figure everything out. Are there any other users here who feel like they're Square Gurus who would be willing to hop on a call with me and explain the whole system? Or if there are video resources that are worth checking out, please let me know!

[DSander]

I get it. I’m 6 years in and all the changes are very welcome once you get the hang of them. Square has been very active lately fulfilling years of requested features. The challenge can be they show up and you don’t know the changes until they’re there. What’s your main challenges at the moment?

[Surajs10]

Before a call, one free place helps: the Product Updates board here, where Square posts each month's changes. The October "What's New From Square" post went up this week and is the quickest way to see what moved.

For the staff side, what usually stops the confusion is a one-page sheet of the five things each person does every shift in the new screens (open a check, split, comp, close, clock out), with the new tap for each. Ten minutes to make, and it saves the same question twenty times a night.

I'm happy to hop on a short call for the parts outside the register, like online ordering, your website or reservations. Is it the new screens for your servers that are causing most of the trouble, or the back office, like menus and reports?

[ChickenRacer]

G'day @plymouthhotelca, fellow hotel operator here (two outback pubs in Queensland, Australia), and you're definitely not alone!

This is one of my biggest frustrations with Square. Updates just appear with no warning, and quite often it's on a Friday at peak time, so the first we hear about it is a staff member yelling "where's the button gone?!" mid-rush haha. I live and breathe Square, and I still regularly find fixes for things I flagged years ago that have quietly been there for a while, and nobody told us.

When I raised it with Square, they said they can't give an exact time because updates are rolled out in stages. Fair enough, but surely they can stage an email to go out with them? Even a quick "here's what's changing on your POS this week" would save a lot of pain. @tranguyen, maybe one to pass along?

In the meantime, a few things that help us:

- +1 to @Surajs10's cheat sheet idea. Keep a one-pager by the register with where the common things now live (open a tab, split, comp, void, close out).

- Keep an eye on the monthly "What's New From Square" posts on the Product Updates board. It's the closest thing we've got to a heads up.

- Happy Hours for specials, so pricing changes automatically on set days and times and staff don't have to remember.

What's tripping you up most at the moment, the front of house screens or the back office? Happy to share how we've got ours set up.