Charge to house accounts

[#1]

Hi sellers! 👋

Let your frequent, trusted customers keep a running balance with you. Collect payment at a later time by sending an invoice, or even setting up automatic payments.

What’s new in this update?

With house accounts, you can deliver a more convenient experience by creating a running bill that customers can pay later with automatic invoices.   

• Check out like any other sale.
• Simply charge the purchase to the customer’s house account on your POS so the sale gets recorded and inventory gets updated automatically.
• Get paid on time.
• Set up recurring invoices to send on schedule so customers can easily pay their balance online with a credit card or ACH payment. For wholesale customers who buy in bulk, you can apply discounts to the whole invoice or individual items.
• Manage and track accounts easily.
• Set spending limits and lock, unlock, or archive accounts quickly from your Square Dashboard or point of sale.

How to access the new features

Get started by creating a house account for your customers. To create individual house accounts for your customers:

1. Log in to your online Square Dashboard and click Payments > House accounts.
2. Click Create House Account.
3. Select the customer for the account and the business location.
4. Optional: Add an account name and notes.
5. Enter a spending limit.
6. Select the customer’s preferred billing method.
7. Click Save.

After you have created your first house account, make sure that you can check your customers out by charging to their house account by adding House Account as a payment option type from your Square app.

To add House Accounts as a payment option in the Square app:

1. Open your Square Point of Sale app and tap ≡ More > Settings > Checkout.
2. Tap Payment.
3. Find House Account.
4. Drag and drop within the list to reorder your payment options.

Benefits of the new features

House Accounts are a great way to create a more convenient checkout experience for your most loyal or frequent customers who need to defer payment to a later date on a regular basis. 

Some ways you can use House Accounts at your business:

• Restaurants
  • Catering and event customers 
  • Frequent diners or club members 

• Retail
  • Frequent shoppers with standing orders or subscription customers 
  • Clients or other businesses that order products or services from your business on a regular basis  

Get started

• To learn more about Square House Accounts, visit our Support Center. 
• To get started, create a house account.

Questions or feedback? Leave a comment below! 😊

[Donnie-M]

Super excited to have this feature live.  It is a great way for those people who run a "tab" to be charged and tracked.  The best thing of all is if you are doing accrual accounting...the sale hits the day it is recorded and not weeks later when an invoice is paid!

[VanKalkerFarms]

This sounds like an awesome and much asked for feature.

[Lovewell]

This seems really cool! Not sure as a coffee shop we will use it but I can see for like bars and even feed stores this would be super handy!

[NeishaArceo]

Feedback about the house account invoices:

The only option when I'm generating an invoice for start date is "balance since last payment."

This can exclude a significant portion of the month in the transaction section of the invoice/statement.

I'm generating invoices for August right now but I can't set the start date of the invoice period to August 1.

So one customer paid for their July invoice on August 17, and their transaction section is blank since their only purchase in August was prior to the 17th.

Another customer made a payment in mid-August, and that payment does show up in the transaction list, but for some reason the top of the statement says last payment was 6/21. And the invoice period / transaction list shows everything 6/10-8/31.

It would be nice to have some more flexibility and not have things so rigidly tied to one invoice. Like the option to pull a statement with all open transactions, or the option to print all transactions for a certain time period.

[tdgjrb]

We have run into this problem as well.

The ability to do invoices for a portion of the balance and/or a better way to receive a partial payment could also use some work.

I fully agree with @NeishaArceo .

[MauritzHardware]

When I click on House Accounts, I do have the option to "create house account". Help!

[Silershine]

Is there a way to charge to house accounts on the virtual terminal? This would allow me to move to square as a point of sale as most of our accounts are net 30 house accounts.

[VanKalkerFarms]

I do not see that you can charge to a house account on the virtual terminal currently.  I am able to select the house account as a customer but it still wants a type of payment.  Maybe that is coming down the road?  I'm not sure as house accounts are basically brand new.

[Silershine]

I hope so because I would love to use square as my main POS but house accounts are a major feature I need to make it work for us as we have customers purchasing multiple times a month then paying the previous month balance at the start of each month.

[_Violet]

Hi @Silershine - Thanks for reaching out to us here on the Square Seller Community👋 I'm happy to help you with this question.

I've merged your post to this thread which has some more info on House Accounts. You can access House Accounts on all Square payment hardware and mobile devices as well as from the Square Point of Sale, Square for Restaurants POS, Square for Retail POS, and Square Appointments POS apps.

However, we currently do not support charging to a House Account in Virtual Terminal. Sorry to be the bearer of bad news on this 😔 I’ve shared your feature request with our Product Team, as they are constantly improving our products based on feedback like this. To learn more about how feature requests work, please see this post from one of our Seller Community Moderators. 

In the meantime, keep an eye out for any updates in our Seller Community. We appreciate your input! 

[MauritzHardware]

Is there a way to print a receipt for a house account that shows the signature captured by the terminal?

[sbennettOSG]

I just received a new Square terminal. It is set up as a POS but the "house account" option is not listed under payments. I have gone to "settings", "checkout", "payment types" and it is not even listed there as an option.

[ryanwanner]

@sbennettOSG If you’re not seeing House Accounts under the Main, More, or Disabled Payment Type sections on the Payment Type screen, I’m betting your terminal isn’t running the latest software. Leave your terminal on and plugged in overnight so it can load the latest version. House Acounts should show after the update. 

[sbennettOSG]

Thank you so much! What an easy fix that I did not think of!

[SuesSweets]

I have a customer who wants to pay his house account in our store, before we have created an invoice (which we do automatically on the first of the month).  Can the customer make a payment at our register for his house account balance without an invoice?   

[_Violet]

Hi @sbennettOSG - Thanks for reaching out to us here on the Square Seller Community👋

I pulled this information from a Support Article for you: 

Once you have House Accounts set up as a payment type in your Point of Sale app, you can start charging purchases to customer’s house accounts. 

To charge purchases to a house account from the Point of Sale app:

1. Open your Square Point of Sale app and tap Checkout.

2. Add items to the sale.

3. Tap Charge.

4. For the payment type, tap House Account.

5. Tap Confirm > Charge.

Note: The ability to split a charge to a house account between two different payment types is not available at this time.

I hope this information is helpful but please do let me know if you have any additional questions.

[Donnie-M]

@Wendyct I wanted to jump on here and just say THANK YOU!  I noticed that house account statements now are fully itemized and I love it.  You have made my life better and I can't thank you enough.  Not sure when it happened, but it happened.

[lmpasutti]

I have been testing the House Account feature in order to manually reserve seats for customers that prefer to pay cash day-of for classes instead of online ahead of time, but there does not seem to be an option to accept cash as payment for House Accounts or to edit outstanding balance with that in mind. 

I was able to refund the house account, but that doesn't seem very clean for bookkeeping.

Am I missing something? Could this feature be added in the future? 

I have tried the invoice option, but it doesn't seem to adjust inventory properly.

[NeishaArceo]

@lmpasutti You can take cash for a house account payment. You have to convert the house account balance to an invoice before you can apply a payment to it though. (It becomes a "balance due" invoice rather than an invoice with inventory items on it, like it would if you just went straight to the invoice screen)

[lmpasutti]

@NeishaArceo I have created an invoice and recorded a payment, but the balance due on the house account still shows. Ultimately, I need a way to for the inventory count for an item to be adjusted from a transaction that will be paid in the future AND a way to accept cash/check on that charge account. Example: RSVP for a class (item) with a set number of seats (quantity in inventory) with a verbal registration to be paid day-of instead of advance. Have tested with house account and invoice and 1) it does not adjust inventory like it should and 2) no apparent/efficient way to clear out that charge account.

[NeishaArceo]

@lmpasutti It can definitely work for the situation you're describing. If you've taken a payment and the balance is still showing in the house account, then I can only assume you created the invoice from the "invoices" section which actually isn't where you want to go because it won't tie to the house account.

So first you ring up the item and select house account as the payment method. This is where it decreases your inventory.

Then you have to go into the house account section, click on the customer, and click the "Collect Payment" button. This creates your invoice. The item on it is called "Balance due" so it doesn't affect your inventory again. Then on the day of the event, you would apply their payment to this invoice.