Taking Deposits on Square Retail

[PopeGregoryIX]

Hi!

We are a company that trades in-person only (very little online presence) and have high-value bespoke products. For this reason, we often take a 50% deposit on ordering.

Is there any way to achieve this? The only way I can see at present is:

Day of Order: Custom Amount -> Take deposit

Day of Collection: Put in the full itemised sale -> Take off the previous custom amount as a "gift card" or discount.

Obviously I'd like to track the order of various goods sold, so am trying to avoid custom amounts where I can, but this seems the only way. Or am I missing something?

Many thanks,

Adam Jones

[Sam_400º · Accepted solution]

Hey @PopeGregoryIX - this should actually be really easy to do! 

If you do your sales as an invoice, adding the customer details and the item you can then break down the total into a deposit and balance. 

Once the invoice is created, tap on it and 'add payment' - take your card payment as normal. When they collect the item, do the same and take the balance. 

This then links all the customer details to the sale too - quite a nice thing for the higher value items. 

Two things to note:

Firstly, the invoice system defaults to sending reminders so you might want to turn that off, as if you're running later than expected for the item to be ready it'll start reminding them!

Secondly within the reporting system it will record the full amount when the balance is paid.  For most accounting this is I think normal, but I'm self employed and do 'simple accounting' and it's a bit of a pain for me. 

[PopeGregoryIX]

Thanks very much for the reply! Yes - I can see that working - we're actually an opticians so sit down with the patient at the time of spectacle dispensing. We could use that opportunity to sort an invoice.

Thanks again - I'll have a look in to how this fits in with our workflow.

Cheers,
Adam

[NickHunter]

Hi

We have the same problem and we are a pub restaurant.

This time of year we have lots of deposits for Christmas parties and we then redeem the deposit on the day of the event.

We currently have a deposit received button, but no redeem option, any suggestions?

Regards

NIck 

[nell_a]

Hi @NickHunter 

Are you using Square for Restaurants? I don't know if there's a deposit feature built into that or not. If there isn't, could you run a sale which is your 'Deposit Received', and then on the day of the event account for that deposit in the form of a discount in a new sale? It's not perfect as you will have to be keeping a record of all the deposits somewhere and then tick them off as each one is redeemed.  

I don't know if would be suitable for your business, but you could explore Square Invoices. Like @Sam_400º says there is a deposit feature built into that and this may be a good route if Invoices is a good fit for your business. 

[Sam_400º]

I think in this situation I’d take the deposit as a gift card, then on the day use the gift card on their bill. 

That way your reporting will be accurate (rather than discounted lines, figuring VAT out etc) and it still keeps all the deposits separate and visible. 

Do you think that would work for you @NickHunter ?

[NickHunter]

Thanks for your help, I think we are going down the discount route

[Emma_]

Hi @NickHunter, thanks for your post. Before I suggest anything additional to what's been suggested above already, I'd like to understand how you take the deposit first. We don't have any Deposit feature in Square for Restaurants app. Can you tell me what Point of Sale app from Square you use to take the deposit? If you can share any screenshot of the Deposit received button too, that'll help me better understand. 

[NickHunter]

Hi Emma, Thanks for coming back to me.

We take deposits from customers for parties, buffets, etc this is processed through ta button on the restaurant App, declared as revenue and a note if taken on the booking that a deposit is paid. 

The problem is when the customer come for the event, we don't have any way of redeeming that deposit after we have entered the customers items for their event.

I don't

appear to be able to upload images

Regards

Nick

[Emma_]

Thanks @NickHunter, I checked this with my team and we don't have a specific feature that will facilitate the deposit for a restaurant type business. This will be a feature request so I will share your feedback with our Product team. 

The workarounds are as suggested above. You can either record it as a Deposit item and deduct the amount from the final bill as a discount or you can charge the deposit as a gift card and apply the gift card to the final bill. 

[NickHunter]

Emma.

We have set up the discount for Christmas deposits received and operated that last week for three days, however it would appear that when we enter the items on the tills and then apply the discount it all works okay and it does indeed deduct the discount from the amount owing by the customer but it also deducts Christmas sales from our total sales for that day, because I think it's because we've applied a discount it's reduced our sales by that amount.

That's not ideal clearly as we are under declaring our sales by the amount of the discount, what should happen is the sales should stay as they are and the discount is then used to reduce the amount of money required to balance.

Any suggestions?

Nick

[k_atie]

Hey @NickHunter, apologies for the delayed reply here. I'm gonna take some time to look into your query to see if I can see what other workaround we have with regards to your query. I'll get back to you as soon as I know more. 

Thanks for your patience.