Sales Tax specification is lost in new Square bulk upload.

[semvaart]

I use bulk upload to update our inventory database so that our inventory specs stay as consistent as possible. In my latest upload, probably a week ago, I had a column for Sales Tax, and the new format with the headers laid out did NOT have a column for Sales Tax specification. All of the new items that I normally put in sales tax on came into the inventory with no specification, and tax was not getting charged by Square. The bulk upload needs to be fixed to add this column back into the item specification!

[Sammie_C]

Hope you are having a good day, @semvaart. Thank you for your post!

I checked in with our Account Services team on this and they were needing a bit of clarification. 

When you say "bulk upload," are you exporting your library first? If so, our Account Services team did a demo on their side and the Sales Tax column is showing as intended when they exported the library first.

Please let me know that detail and then we can go from there.

[semvaart]

Did you see the detail in the reply to the original message? I put it in the wrong place. The bulk upload does not pick up the Sales Tax column.

[Sammie_C]

I did see those details, and our Account Services team is wanting to make sure we understand the issue fully.

So just to clarify, what did you put in the wrong place?

[semvaart]

The thing in the wrong place was the message in this set of threads. Let me reiterate the problem.

I did an export of my whole catalog. I then used the bulk upload process to add items to it.

During the upload process, I checked the headings in my spreadsheet against the headings on the web page that now appear in boxes in the interface to ensure that we had all the key ones correct in the bulk upload spreadsheet. All of my headings were all OK except that in the web page with the boxes around the column names, there was no Sales Tax column in a box at the right end of the list. My right-most column in the upload was the sales tax indicator which has been processed correctly in the past.

I did the bulk upload. It seemed to work. However, none of the new items I uploaded had the Sales tax indicator set properly for the "Y" that was in my spreadsheet column for them. 

You need to add back the Sales Tax indicator column in the bulk upload process. 

[Sammie_C]

Thank you for explaining the issue again.

I went ahead and reached out to our Account Services team with your explanation and they said that the next best steps would be to have you reach out directly to our Customer Support teams on this. Unfortunately we offer limited support on the Community as we do not have access to your account specifics. 

When you talk with Customer Support, you may need to provide the actual documents you are looking at, so that our tech teams can look into this further.

If you'd like to speak with our Support Team by phone, you can give us a call at 855-700-6000 between 6am-6pm Pacific Time Monday-Friday. You can also get in touch with our Messaging and Email Support Teams at any time here: squ.re/contact. Or feel free to send us a Direct Message on X, Instagram, or Facebook.

I'm sorry I couldn't be too much help here, but our Customer Support teams will be able to get this resolved for you. Let me know if you have any other questions in the meantime.

[NoblePiesGuy]

In the downloads of my item catalog, only one of my 3 tax rates appears. I have a Westchester Tax rate, an Orange County tax rate, and a Dutchess tax rate. Only the Westchester tax rate appears in my downloads, as the last column in the sheet. I really do not want to work via my dashboard item by item checking on the proper tax settings. I would like to do it through the export/import process. Where would my other 2 tax rates be?

[semvaart]

I always do a full export, then an incremental bulk upload and then an incremental export of the results. The export showed all of the columns I expected with their data. The new items in the bulk upload all had "Y" in the sales tax column. The Excel spreadsheet that I exported after the incremental upload had no sales tax flag in them. BTW, the view to check the input data that now has headers in boxes above the columns did not show a sales tax header.

[semvaart]

After I had this conversation with the community, the problem went away.

When I did a bulk upload again tonight, the problem is back. No sales tax specification in the inventory entries I just added. I also noted that the full set of headers was not shown for my comparison check. The headers stopped with the Option 1 columns. The columns to the right of that in the download were not visible and presumably did not get loaded. Sales tax was the only one I was using.

I filed a support email since it is late. 

[Sammie_C]

Sorry for the delayed response here, I was out of office. Thank you for the update!

Have you heard back from support yet on this?

[semvaart · Accepted solution]

Yes, there is a resolution to the immediate problem. If one does a bulk download of the database, copies the headers, pastes them into the upload file columns for the new items, and then does the upload, it appears to work. 

If you leave any column out that is expected by Square (like the new alcohol column), 4 or more columns includng the sales tax field will not be filled in from the input file. There is no warning message. The web page just refuses to scroll all the way to the right column in the upload file header check. If you do the upload anyway, there will be multiple columns that are not properly set even though the SKU and earlier description and some other fields will be added to the database -- a partial upload but no warning that it is incomplete. I reported the incomplete load with no warning as a bug.

To get to this point, I spent 3 hours 20 minutes with 12 different people in a chat session last week and 3/4 hour on the phone with support this week.

[Sammie_C]

Thank you for confirming all of this information. I do apologize that it took so long for our support teams to reach a resolution though. In the meantime, please let me know if you end up having any other questions or concerns and I can look into this issue further for you.

[NoblePiesGuy]

I am not understanding the workaround. When I download the entire item library, the last column is my "Westchester Tax (8.735%)".  I am missing 2 more sales taxes for Orange and Dutchess Counties. If I copy the column headers to paste to another spreadsheet with more items, I will still be missing the column headers for those taxes. I could try to add the tax headers in manually into the new spreadsheet, but I don't want to chance corrupting what is already there.  I might try adding the headers manually and do an incremental upload of just one new item to see how it goes.

[semvaart]

I'm sorry to tell you that I was solving a much simpler problem since I could copy my whole header row from a download and get the desired effect. If you don't get those other tax headers in your download, support needs to tell you how it can recognize them in the upload. Hope you can get someone on the phone without suffering through the chat cycles.

One other thing I did find after figuring out the new interface is that there is a small link on the lower left of the new interface screen that says something like "use the old interface." If that worked for you in the past, it is still available. You can avoid the new interface that is pickier and doesn't tell you when it fails.

Hope things work better in the new year.