[New] Printer Profiles

[#1]

Hi sellers! 👋

What’s new?
Printer Profiles! Printer Profiles are printer settings shared across devices and locations. Printer Profiles can be created and updated on Point of Sale or on Square Dashboard. Updates sync across all devices. Printer Profiles will replace Printer Stations.

What is that?

Today Square devices manage printers and their settings through a “Printer Station”. Printer Stations are 1:1 to a device & printer combo, so if you have a “Bar printer”, a “receipt printer”, and an “online-order printer”, alongside 2 Square Registers, you need to configure all 3 printers on each device – That’s a total of 6 printer stations, or repeating setup 6 times!

Printer Profiles allow you to take all of the settings (like what categories to print, whether to include kitchen names, compact layouts, print automatically, etc) and package them up into a single shared group that automatically syncs across all of your devices.

That means that if you were to set printers up like the example above, but using Printer Profiles, instead of repeating yourself 6 times you would instead:

1. Configure Bar profile (Order tickets)

2. Configure Receipts (Receipts, in person orders)

3. Configure Online Order profile (Online orders)

4. Go to Register 1, go to Hardware > Printers > See list of printers and profiles, assign printer to the appropriate Profiles from above

5. Go to Register 2, assign printers to appropriate profiles

… and that’s it! All done!

Where can I find them?

Printer Profiles can be found where stations used to be, Settings > Hardware > Printers. 

What else?

Printer Profiles have all the same options and settings that printer stations did, so configuring them should feel pretty familiar – the only difference is profiles can be shared across all your devices.

You don’t have to jump right into things, your existing printer stations will be preserved and can be upgraded to a Printer Profile when you choose to do so – this is called “converting to profile” and is just a single tap in the station’s settings page.

You can manage all of your printer profiles from Square Dashboard as well, in Device Management > Printer Profiles where you will see all profiles across all your locations, and can create/edit/delete them right there. You can’t assign profiles to specific printers from Dashboard yet, but that’s something we’re looking to add in the future!

Great, how do I get started?

You just need to update to the latest version and head into Settings > Hardware > Printers to get started! This is available as of version 6.28 on Apple or Google app stores (6.27 for Square for Retail), or the update to the latest version on Square Terminal and Registers.

[TCSlaguna]

Also Jewelry Labels for the WIN!!!

I'm seeing a lot of cool new features coming to Square. I think all the disparate parts are finally coming together to create one amazing platform. 

[TheRealChipA]

@tylerd This is cool, but I’m not seeing it on my POS.  I updated all POS (standard, restaurants, retail, etc) to the latest versions.  I set up profiles on my online dashboard.  But when I try to create a new printer on any POS, there is no “assign printer profile” popup.  It’s the old experience.  Any thoughts?

[Candlestore]

@TheRealChipA ;

I will look how to do this when I get to my store, I have them setup on my Ipad Stands.

[Candlestore]

@TheRealChipA ;

On my Ipad for Square for Retail:

More > Settings > Hardware > Printers > Then on this screen you should see a 2 Tabs for Printer and Profiles Profiles on the Right.  

When you click Printers Tab you will have a List of your Current Printers.  On the right side there is a > click this and you can edit which profile is assigned to this printer.

When you click Profiles you should see the Profiles listed you setup in your Dashboard.

Hope this helps you locate this, its not simple   lol

[TheRealChipA]

Thanks, @Candlestore.  Ok I see it in the Retail App.  But for the life of me I do not see the same thing in sPOS or Restaurants.  Only Retail.  I’ve read and reread and reread the announcement above and don’t see anything to indicate that profiles won’t work on those two apps, but so far it doesn’t seem to be on those two apps.  Hopefully @tylerd can enlighten me! LOL

[tylerd]

@TheRealChipA for the SPOS/Restaurant applications, are you using iOS? 

We make these announcements when most of our features have rolled out, but we are still technically a few days away from reaching 100% (Retail went first for this feature). You should get the feature within the week just make sure you're updated to the latest versions of the app.

[TheRealChipA]

@tylerd Yes, iPadOS.  And ok, that makes some sense.  Thanks for the enlightenment!

[crownandrye]

After yesterday update on our restaurants app, 2 of our tsp100 thermal printers have disappeared from our hardware/printers options to configure.  The printers are fine and no error lights but they are gone.  any help?

[_Violet]

Hi @crownandrye  - I'm sorry to hear that this issue with your printers has brought you to the Seller Community.

I suggest starting out with the troubleshooting steps listed here. If this doesn't improve things, please reach out to Support directly by logging into your Square account and heading here for further assistance.

I hope this helps!

[Rp3]

The big problem with Square printing remains that it is linked to reporting categories and not a dedicated printing category.  This makes it impossible to have complex kitchen orders printed to different physical stations without making your category reporting useless. Hoping these profiles are somehow a steppingstone to a more advanced printing system, especially for restaurants.

As a note, it did kind of suck to get this update right at the start of friday dinner rush. when you get the update, it disables all of the printers connected to that device and requires a restart before the device detects the printers again. 

Also, it would be nice if you could see the printers IP address when you are assigning printer stations. It took a little more focus than was ideal at the frantic moment I was in to understand which printers I should assign to which station since they were just listed as the model number and not distinguished from other identical printers we have in any way. You need to change screens to get the IP then through trial and error, figure out which printer in the list corresponds to the IP of the printer you are trying to assign....maybe I was missing something since I was in a bit of a panic at the time.

[TradeStreet]

This threw us for a loop. Ticket printer stopped working, receipt printer works. Test prints are successful from either register, but no tickets will print.

New features are great but this is frustrating. We are manually printing tickets on our receipt printer.

I am going in now to tinker more. Neat upgrade, but the rollout and execution is not acceptable to me.

[TradeStreet]

Read the article linked above and trying....

[_Violet]

Hi there, @TradeStreet - I'm sorry to hear that you're experiencing some issues with your ticket printer.

If you have already gone through the troubleshooting steps I mentioned here, your next step would be to contact our Support Team for further assistance and investigation. If you haven't already, please reach out to Support directly by logging into your Square account and heading here.

[Eda0617]

1.  Square, for love of GOD, be sure you're updates are ready before pushing them.  This has caused me SO many issues and you pushed it on a FRIDAY NIGHT.  Just further proof that no one in your company has experience working in restaurants and you shouldn't offer Square for RESTAURANTS if you can't handle operating within restaurants. 

2. I have an iPad in a stand that is connected to a cash drawer and it's own printer behind the bar (Bar POS). This printer prints both bar drink tickets and receipts. In the kitchen, I have an additional iPad in a stand with it's own printer (we call this the server ice well POS).  For some reason - now with this "printer profiles" update - my Bar POS is sending receipts to both my bar printer AND my Server Ice Well Printer.  If I disable this printer on my Bar POS iPad, I get a printing error that populates EVERY time my staff prints a check. If I enable it, then it sends receipts to both printers wasting tons of printer paper. 

Square - you did not have all the bugs in this update worked out when you pushed it. Fix it. Yesterday. Before I throw all your hardware into the street. 

[TheRealChipA]

I’m obviously closed for the season (ice cream) but wanted to add my 2-cents, anyway.  Rolling out any updates on a Friday, especially on the Restaurants POS/platform, does seem to be inviting trouble for no good reason.  Having said that, if there were more support available (especially a dedicated engineer or 6) to fight the inevitable fires that result on our busiest days, maybe it would be ok to roll out changes on a Friday.  But, IMHO (in my Hospitality opinion… ha) it would be wiser to wait and roll out significant changes to the masses on a Monday or Tuesday.  Just saying…

Oh, and I agree with the IP address thing @Rp3 brought up.  Back in the days I used printers and not KDS that was a life-saver.

[cafe_circuit600]

The profiles is a nice new feature. The one bug is the profiles are not saving the "categories to print" that we select for a profile. 

For example, for one profile, I will very carefully select the two correct categories we want and hit save. On the profile page It correctly displays "2 categories". but when i hit "2 categories" to make sure it saved correctly, there are a half a dozen random categories selected.

This has been absolutely MADDENING as we have a complex set up with a dozen profiles for multiple printers. I hope this bug gets fixed soon. 

[PizzaKing]

Does anyone know how to edit a printer profile? Maybe I'm just missing it but I don't see the option anywhere.

Thanks

[TheRealChipA]

Hey @PizzaKing. You’re not alone.  It’s definitely not obvious or easy to spot.  I know where it is and STILL have to look around every time I want to do this. Ha.  See screen shot from the Standard POS, though it is in the same place for all POS (Restaurants, Retail).  Click on Profiles (circled in red) and then you can do what you need.

[mkhellman]

Since our account had our online and dashboard categories merged this weekend, we have not been able to select categories within our printer profiles. The only categories that are available within the printer profiles are the kitchen routing categories, which we do not use and do not have turned on. I need a way to be able to select from our item category list as we did before within a printer profile, right now my workaround is to use the kitchen routing categories, but this voids the upgrade to combining multiple category listings that were just merged, since now I need to create categories in kitchen routing and item categories - maybe I am missing something, but this is frustrating, since the merge was supposed eliminate a step and it seems to cause another step instead for us.