What's New From Square: September Features Coming Soon (Volume 12)

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Hey Square Community,

A few weeks ago, we rolled out Volume 11, and the response has been incredible. Thank you to everyone who shared feedback, asked questions, and helped other sellers navigate the changes.

We're here with another set of features and improvements coming this month across inventory and item setup, payments and refunds, kitchen operations, online ordering, device management, and Square Credit Card. Some are available for early access, and the rest will be fully available by September 21.

This is Volume 12. Here's what's new.

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Inventory Management

Customize barcode label layouts on Point of Sale for iOS 🇦🇺 🇨🇦 🇬🇧 🇮🇪 🇺🇸 🇯🇵 🇪🇸 🇫🇷

Sellers pick which fields print on a barcode label — item name, SKU, price, supplier information, and more — then adjust sizing and rearrange the content to match how the labels get used. Layouts are set and printed from Point of Sale on Square Stand. Before this change, the layout was fixed, so labels printed with whatever fields Square included by default.

Why it matters: A boutique tagging shelf edges needs the price large and the supplier code small, while a hardware store pricing bins by unit needs different fields entirely. Setting the fields and layout in Square gives sellers that design flexibility while keeping label printing tied to the item record it came from.

Access: Available on Point of Sale with Square Stand, for sellers on Square Plus and above. In Point of Sale, open the barcode printing options to adjust the label layout.

Separate item settings for variation preselection and skipping customization 🇦🇺 🇨🇦 🇬🇧 🇮🇪 🇺🇸 🇯🇵 🇪🇸 🇫🇷

Two behaviors now turn on and off independently for each item. "Automatically select first variation" pre-selects the first variation — a size, for example — when the item is tapped, and staff confirm or change that selection. "Skip customization when possible" bypasses the item details screen when every required selection is already satisfied.

Why it matters: The two behaviors used to be tied together in one implicit setting, and Standard mode and F&B mode read that setting differently. An item set up for faster entry always came with an auto-selected variation, and an item that required an explicit variation choice always came with an extra confirmation step. In high-volume bar and counter-service settings, the same items get rung in over and over through a shift, so each item can now follow the entry pattern the seller wants.

Access: Available on Square Free. In Dashboard, go to Items and open an item to find both settings. The settings apply per item on Point of Sale in Standard, F&B, and Retail modes.

Set the order modifiers print on kitchen tickets 🇦🇺 🇨🇦 🇬🇧 🇮🇪 🇺🇸 🇯🇵 🇪🇸 🇫🇷

Sellers set the sequence modifiers appear in on kitchen tickets printed from Point of Sale, item by item, using the Kitchen Faced option in an item's Modifiers section in Dashboard. Modifiers previously printed in whatever order they were rung up at checkout, with no way to change that. Once a sequence is saved for an item, printed tickets follow it instead of the checkout order. This matches the modifier sequencing already available for Kitchen Display System. Sequencing applies only to modifiers available on Point of Sale — modifiers that are not won't follow the sequence on printed tickets.

Why it matters: Kitchens run on repetition, and cooks read faster when the same information lands in the same spot on every ticket. A sandwich shop can print bread, then protein, then toppings — the order the line actually builds the sandwich — rather than the order a cashier happened to tap the options. That keeps cooks from scanning back and forth across a ticket mid-rush.

Access: In Square Dashboard, go to Item Library, select an item to open the item edit page, and set Kitchen Faced in the Modifiers section. Available to sellers on Square Plus using Square for Restaurants.

Payments & Checkout

Dark mode and appearance override in the Invoices app 🇦🇺 🇨🇦 🇬🇧 🇮🇪 🇺🇸 🇯🇵 🇪🇸 🇫🇷

The Square Invoices app follows the device's system appearance setting, so it displays in dark mode when the phone is set to dark. Changing the system setting changes the app to match. Sellers who want the app to look different from the rest of the device set a dark mode override, which holds the chosen appearance regardless of the system setting.

Why it matters: A mobile groomer writing up an invoice in a dim client hallway, or a contractor billing from a truck cab after dark, gets an app that matches the rest of the phone instead of a bright white screen. Dark mode also makes the app more accessible for sellers who read more comfortably on a dark background.

Access: No action is needed for the app to match the device's system appearance setting. To set an appearance that differs from the system setting, go to Settings > Appearance in the Square Invoices app and choose the dark mode override.

Refund a card without a linked original payment 🇦🇺 🇨🇦 🇬🇧 🇮🇪 🇺🇸 🇯🇵 🇪🇸 🇫🇷

Team members issue refunds from Transactions in Point of Sale even when Square has no record of the original sale. Refunds go out by amount or against selected items, and the funds land on any card — dipped or tapped in person, or keyed in manually.

Why it matters: At a festival or concert running a reusable cup or bottle deposit-return scheme, customers hand back a cup and expect their deposit with no matching charge on Square to refund against. An unlinked refund covers that case: staff enter the amount or select the deposit item, and the customer dips or taps the card that receives the funds instead of reading out a card number. Permission and cap settings determine which team members can run these refunds and how much a single refund can be.

Access: In Point of Sale, go to Transactions to issue an unlinked refund, with card-present and manual card entry both offered as refund destinations.

Notes: Access to unlinked refunds is set per team-member permission, and refunds are capped at a configurable amount per transaction.

Menu & Kitchen Operations

Extend Uber Eats prep times with Busy mode on Point of Sale 🇺🇸

Sellers with the Uber Eats integration add time to the prep times on incoming Uber Eats orders from Point of Sale, without pausing orders altogether. The setting is temporary, so prep times return to normal once the kitchen catches up. It connects directly to Busy Mode in Uber Eats, so the longer prep time carries through to the Uber Eats marketplace.

Why it matters: A pizzeria slammed with delivery orders on a Friday night has had two options — keep quoting prep times the kitchen can't hit, or turn Uber Eats off and lose the orders entirely. Extending prep times from Point of Sale gives the line more room during a rush while orders keep coming in. It's one more way to manage kitchen capacity when demand is unpredictable or seasonal.

Access: Available on Square Free. On Square Point of Sale, go to Orders, tap Order timing (the stopwatch icon in the upper right), then select Uber Eats > Busy mode. An active Uber Eats integration is required.

Keep a dine-in tab open across rounds with QR code ordering 🇺🇸

Guests scan a table QR code and open a tab, add more food or drinks to the same order over the course of the visit, then pay once at the end. Opening a tab preauthorizes the guest's card, and the full payment completes when the guest closes out. Staff see the tab as a single in-progress order in Point of Sale and work it through Open Tickets until that final payment.

Why it matters: Dine-in service at bars, breweries, taprooms, restaurants, and cafés often runs as several rounds across one visit rather than one order and one checkout. Open tabs match that pattern: a guest orders another round from the same QR code, the items land on the order already open at that table, and the server manages one ticket in Point of Sale from the first drink through the close-out.

Access: Available on Square Plus, which matches the plan requirement for floor plans. In Square Dashboard, go to Online Ordering > QR Code Ordering and turn on Allow dine-in customers to open a tab. Guests start a tab from either the location QR code or floor plan QR codes.

Notes: A minimum preauthorization amount can be set for tabs.

Reorder tickets by dragging on Kitchen Display System 🇦🇺 🇨🇦 🇬🇧 🇮🇪 🇺🇸 🇯🇵 🇪🇸 🇫🇷

Kitchen staff drag a ticket into a new position on the Kitchen Display System screen to set the prep sequence themselves. Dragging becomes available once the ticket sequence in the device's Layout settings is set to manual. The screen gives visual feedback as a ticket moves, the custom order holds until that ticket is completed, and manual ordering applies across main, expo, and station views.

Why it matters: On a Friday night, a pizza kitchen gets dine-in, pickup, and delivery tickets arriving in bursts, and strict chronological order puts a large party's ticket ahead of a delivery driver already waiting at the counter. Dragging tickets into the order the line actually cooks them recreates the physical chit rail, where the expo decides what gets pulled forward.

Access: On the Kitchen Display System device, open Settings and go to the Layout section, then set ticket sequence to manual to turn on reordering. Once manual sequence is set, tickets can be dragged in any Kitchen Display System view.

Online Ordering & Fulfillment

Online ordering settings in one reorganized Dashboard overview 🇺🇸

The cash tag, menu settings, and other online ordering controls are grouped together on a single overview page in Square Dashboard, rather than spread across several separate pages. The change is to the layout only — each setting works exactly as it did before, and nothing has been added or removed.

Why it matters: A restaurant updating its online menu before a weekend rush previously moved between multiple pages to find the menu controls and the cash tag. Keeping those settings in one overview means an online presence can be reviewed and adjusted from a single view. It also lays the groundwork for managing additional kinds of online selling from the same page in later releases.

Access: Available on Square Free. In Square Dashboard, go to Online Ordering. The reorganized layout applies automatically, so sellers who already manage their online ordering settings don't need to take any action.

Operations & Device Management

Ring up items on one grid across Standard, Booking, and Services modes 🇦🇺 🇨🇦 🇬🇧 🇮🇪 🇺🇸 🇯🇵 🇪🇸 🇫🇷

The item grid gets denser tiles and cleaner type, and existing tiles, favorites, and categories carry over automatically. The same grid appears in Standard, Booking, and Services modes on every platform, so a layout set up once shows up everywhere. The keypad and quantity entry work exactly as they do today. Sellers previously maintained a separate item grid for each mode.

Why it matters: A salon that rings up the same three add-on services all afternoon spots those tiles faster on a denser grid. And because one layout carries across modes, the grid looks the same whether the front desk is taking a walk-in payment or checking out a booked appointment.

Access: Available on Square Free, rolling out automatically to Square Point of Sale sellers with no setup required. Sellers who prefer the previous item grid can turn the new one off in Square Dashboard under Early Feature Access > Item Grid.

Smart Upsells enabled by default on Kiosk 🇺🇸

Square Kiosk recommends related add-on items to customers as part of the standard ordering experience, with Smart Upsells turned on by default. Sellers control whether Upsells stays on through the kiosk group settings profile in Square Dashboard. Sellers previously had to find the setting and turn the feature on themselves.

Why it matters: At a quick-service taco shop with two kiosks by the door, no team member is standing there to ask whether a customer wants a drink or a side. Smart Upsells puts related add-ons in front of the customer during ordering. Because it's on by default, sellers don't have to go looking for the setting first.

Access: Sellers who want Smart Upsells running don't need to take any action. To review the setting, go to Square Dashboard → Settings → Device Management → Kiosk and select the group settings profile assigned to the kiosk device. Under Settings, click Manage, then under Checkout select Upsells, turn the feature on, and click Save.

Sort kitchen ticket items by seat on printers and Kitchen Display System 🇦🇺 🇨🇦 🇬🇧 🇮🇪 🇺🇸 🇯🇵 🇪🇸 🇫🇷

Printed order tickets and Kitchen Display System chits sort items by seat number once a seller picks that sort order. With Seat selected, shared and table-share items print first, followed by items in ascending seat order as a flat list — no seat headers or sections. The option is available on Kitchen Display System chits, Kitchen Display System printed tickets, and Point of Sale printed tickets on both iOS and Android.

Why it matters: Full-service restaurants read tickets top to bottom on the pass. Without seat sorting, expo and runners had to mentally re-sort every ticket to match plates to guests, and the only workaround was dragging items around on the check before firing it. Point of Sale already sorted the cart by seat on screen, so tickets and chits now follow the same order staff see when they ring the order in.

Access: Available on Square Plus. Set the sort per printer profile in Settings > Hardware > Printers, select the profile, then choose Seat under Item sort order. On the Kitchen Display System, the same option is available in the station's chit sort setting.

Banking & Financial Services

Attach receipts and notes to Credit Card transactions 🇺🇸

Sellers reply to a text message with a photo of a receipt right after paying with a Square Credit Card, and Square matches the image to the most recent transaction. From Square Dashboard, sellers attach or remove receipts and add or edit notes on any Credit Card transaction. Transactions export along with their notes and receipt images, ready to upload into accounting software.

Why it matters: A caterer buying flowers from one supplier and produce from two others in a single morning collects three paper receipts that are easy to lose by the end of the week. Capturing each one by text at the moment of purchase keeps proof of the expense, and the reason for it, attached to the transaction itself. That makes reconciliation less of a hunt at month end.

Access: Receipt-request text messages are off by default. Square Credit Card sellers turn them on in the Square Dashboard under Credit Card > Settings > Manage notifications. Once turned on, sellers submit receipts by text message and manage receipts and notes from a transaction's details in the Activity section of Credit Card in Square Dashboard.

🎉 Your Feedback in Action

These updates are a direct result of feedback and feature requests shared across the community! Here's how the Community helped shape what we're launching:

Refund a card without a linked original payment — Sellers have been asking for this one since 2018. @BlackHorseGifts put it plainly: "We need a refund button. Sometimes the receiver of the gift does not have a “gift receipt” and we can't find it in transactions." @WineRetail @ccunningham @adornwaco @ewmitchell @Armstrong1 and @Museum2022 all asked the same question in different words. And @LannLannLannah and @Bree15 described exactly the scenario we built for — refunding cup deposits at a festival with no original charge to match against. You can now issue a refund from Transactions in Point of Sale even when Square has no record of the original sale, by amount or against selected items, straight back to the customer's card.

Sort kitchen ticket items by seat on printers and Kitchen Display System — @JamesSandbar asked for more than just showing seat numbers: "group/sort items together by seat for efficiency." @Cscottlee explained why it matters on the line — "It is very hard to plate our tacos when you don't know what tacos go on the same plate" — and @BSLprints asked the same about grouping by course or seat. Printed tickets and KDS chits now sort by seat when you pick that sort order, with shared and table-share items first.

Reorder tickets by dragging on Kitchen Display System — @jordan_taylor told us about running three KDS screens, two prep and one expo: "The prep people would love to be able to manually move tickets around." @Stricks_BBQ wanted to "move tickets in line to back of line or be able to move tickets to specific places in line." Set ticket sequence to manual in your device's Layout settings and your team can now drag tickets into the order the kitchen actually cooks them — across main, expo, and station views.

Set the order modifiers print on kitchen tickets — @ldeespancakes flagged that modifiers listed in a deliberate order still "print completely differently on the kitchen tickets," and @KebabOnKent had been asking since 2020 after kebab modifiers printed "in an illogical order on the dockets." Using the Kitchen Faced option in an item's Modifiers section, you now set the sequence per item, and printed tickets follow it instead of the order things were rung up.

Keep a dine-in tab open across rounds with QR code ordering — @RookRoomAnnelis and @chrismorlang both run game cafés and both told us the same thing: without open tabs on QR ordering, every round became its own full checkout with its own tip prompt. Guests can now scan a table QR code, open a tab, keep adding through the visit, and pay once at the end — while your team manages it as a single ticket in Point of Sale.

Separate item settings for variation preselection and skipping customization — @TheRealChipA had been working around this for twelve years: with sizes as variations, staff moving fast on a Saturday night would leave the first variation selected and ring up a small instead of a large. The ask even suggested the fix — "I'd be perfectly fine if this were controlled by a new setting." Automatically select first variation and Skip customization when possible are now independent toggles on each item.

Customize barcode label layouts on Point of Sale for iOS — When we brought label layout customization to Square Register in Volume 9, it was Register-only. @lux_pos had asked for both halves — different label designs for jewellery tags, and the ability "to print barcodes from the Square Register or an iOS device." That second half is now here: pick which fields print, adjust sizing and rearrange content on Point of Sale with Square Stand.

💬 Community Conversations

Here’s what else is happening across the Community worth knowing about:

Open Tabs went through Early Access before today's launch — and your testing shaped it. When we opened Open Tabs for Online Ordering Profiles for early testing in August, sellers put it through its paces in live service and found things we hadn't. @yardgoat discovered that items added after a tab was opened weren't printing to the kitchen — a fix went out, and they confirmed it working earlier this month. @SVLFever worked through a menu setup issue that turned out to be items not assigned to the ordering profile, then flagged that doing it for 100+ items one at a time is no fun, plus surfaced a gap in alcohol age verification. @LTDBrewing raised that debit-card pre-authorisation holds don't sit well with their customers, and @backyard made a strong case for a QR-only menu so in-house drinks don't appear on the pickup site. Thanks also to @CinderBistro @noworyz123 @theabbymh and @emilyz123for the questions and use-case pressure-testing.

Read the full discussion →

💬 We Want to Hear From You

Tried a new feature? Share your experience in Feedback Discussions — look for posts tagged Release Feedback or start your own.

Need help or running into an issue? Post in our Help boards where fellow sellers and Square Champions can chime in.

Have an idea for something new? Share it in the Feature Requests board. The more details you provide about your use case, the better we can prioritize.

Thank you to everyone who takes the time to share feature requests, vote on ideas, and participate in discussions. Your input directly impacts our product roadmap, and we're always listening!

🪧 Stay in the Know

Browse the Early Feature Access tab in your Square Dashboard to get a head start on upcoming features.
Visit Square Release Notes for the latest product updates, or browse the Feature Log for a full history of what's shipped.

Have questions about anything here? Drop them in the comments below. ⬇️