Is there a way to restrict items to only be able sold by managers

[ICStache]

Is there a way to restrict items to only be able sold by managers? For example, we have cake orders and wholesale orders that require manager approval in order to sell. We also have servers under 16 and not able to sell certain items. The only place I see where I can put a required code on something is in Discounts and then unless I am missing something, to make it specific to an item, I have to create it as an automatic discount,, which negates requiring the code. It also requires me to actually have a positive amount discount, which I don't want to discount the item, simply limit who has permission to sell the item. 

Any help to the square newbie would be appreciated. Thanks

[TheRealChipA]

Hi @ICStache.  Welcome to Square and to the Seller Community.  To answer your question, there is no way to restrict items added to transactions to just managers.  Until a few years ago, I had a similar situation because I sold boozy milkshakes and such and most of my employees were under 21.  All I was able to do was instill the fear of a diety into those employees that they were never to key in or accept money for transactions with “adult” items on them.  Honestly, since I trusted my employees implicitly and they never violated that trust, I never thought to submit a feature request to cover this.  But, it sounds like you might want to submit this feature request.  Also, as you have found out, there is no way to force the discount feature to do this back-door workaround, and I doubt Square would even consider such a thing.  So… For now I have a couple of suggestions.  

First, head over to the Ideate Board and submit a feature request to the Restaurants POS team asking them to consider adding an item setting to restrict sales based upon employee permissions.  Post the link to that request here and I, for one, will definitely support it with a like/upvote and my own comments, even though I don’t need that feature any more.  Submitting this request will start an evaluation process, but resolution/implementation would not be quick, as you are probably aware.

Otherwise, the only other suggestion I have is that you might be able to set up a second “location” that has your restricted items in it.  Tag all of your restricted items to that location only, and only give your managers access to that location.  There would be some complications about how to switch locations on the POS when the customer wants restricted items, and I can not right now tell you all of the gotchas with this possible solution.  What I do know is that when I considered it a few years ago, I realized that it was going to be more hassle for me than it was worth.  I just decided to be firm about our policy and trust my employees to do their jobs.  For me, that actually worked.