Reporting on Number of Transactions Per Hour over a period ot time

[flightcoffeeco]

I would like to be able to export the number of transactions per hour over a period of time so that I would know how many people I need on the schedule each hour.  Right now, you can view  the transactions by hour on the Sales Summary page by mousing over the time of day graph that shows total sales and transactions for each one hour block.  This is useful, but limited as I would have to manually mouse over and copy each hour for each day that I wanted information for. So, If I wanted to find the average number of transactions at 9:00 A.M. on Saturdays over a three month period, that would me a lot of mousing and copying.   I would like to be able to see a report that shows the transactions for each hour by day.  It would look a bit like the Sales Summary report in that there would be a column for each day within the period (say the month of March), but the rows would be 5:00 A.M., 6:00 A.M. 7:00 AM, etc, showing the total number of transactions for each hour.

[londontea]

Hey @flightcoffeeco! I was really curious to see if there was a way to do this since the data is visible in the dashboard through the graph that you mentioned. I played around with the custom reports to see if there was an easy way to get an hour by hour report of transactions but I didn't have any luck. 

Unfortunately I don't think there's an easy way to do this. There are two workarounds, but they're both complicated for different reasons. You can set up reporting hours for each hour of the day, then toggle through each hour to see how many transactions there were. Here is how you'd do it: 

1. Go to the Payment Methods report in your dashboard. 
2. Select the days you want to get the information for. 
3. Choose "All Day" and then "Add Reporting Hours." 
4. Enter the first hour that you're open (ie, 7am to 7:59am).
   1. Make sure it ends on the 59 minute mark otherwise you'll double count any sales that happen at 8am, 9am, etc.
5. Click "Save and add another" then repeat for each hour that you're open. 
   1. You only need to do this once. In the future Square will remember the reporting hours that you entered. 
6. Once all of your hours have been entered, choose one of your hours, then click "Summary" and switch it to "Daily."
7. You may also need to change the toggle at the far right of the screen from "Total Collected" to "Payments."
8. The report will show the total number of payments collected each day during the hour and date range that you selected. 
9. Repeat steps 6-8 for each hour that you're open. 

The other way involves pulling a transaction CSV to get the information that you need, but it requires a lot of skill with a spreadsheet program. You'll have to use filters, sorting, and counting formulas to get the information that you need. It would be faster, but only if you're very familiar with spreadsheets. I'm not that great with Excel but maybe someone else could provide some assistance.