Lack of Native Bump Bar Integration

[Bagelman1028]

To the Square Team,

As a business owner using Square KDS in a fast-paced kitchen environment, I want to highlight a critical shortcoming that continues to affect operational efficiency: the lack of native bump bar integration.

In kitchens, grease-covered hands or food-service gloves make it difficult—and in some cases risky—to interact with touchscreens. This not only slows down workflow but also increases the risk of malfunction or damage to the screen over time. A bump bar resolves this by offering a durable, tactile alternative that many other leading POS systems support out-of-the-box.

Platforms like Toast, Clover, NCR, Lightspeed, Oracle, EPOS, and TouchBistro have already implemented full bump bar integration into their KDS systems. Square, unfortunately, appears to be lagging behind on this essential feature.

It’s also concerning that despite paying for a Square KDS subscription, users still have to invest in third-party equipment and workarounds to enable bump bar functionality—if it's even possible. This functionality should be built into the Square KDS system itself, especially when your competitors offer it natively without requiring extra configuration.

Square is known for being user-friendly and cost-effective, but on this front, it is visibly falling behind. For high-volume kitchens and enterprise users, lack of proper bump bar support is becoming a dealbreaker.

We urge Square to prioritize this feature—especially when the solution is more about software recognition than hardware development. Allowing users to plug in a bump bar and seamlessly navigate the KDS should be a basic, supported function, not an expensive workaround.

Sincerely,

Bagelman

[_Violet]

Hello @Bagelman1028 👋 My name is Violet and I'm one of the Moderators here in the Square Community. Nice to meet you 🙂 I noticed this is your first time posting, so I'd like to officially welcome you!

Thank you for your feedback regarding the need for a bump bar feature on Square KDS. Since this is a feature request, I've moved your post to the Square KDS Ideate Board. Our Ideate Boards are where Sellers can submit feature requests, and our Moderators update the status of the request, as more information is shared from our Product Teams. You can read more about the Ideate process here.

Additionally, I've updated the status to "Open". This step in the Feature Request process will be a time in which other Square Sellers can add their use cases to your idea to make it stronger and demonstrate further how much it is needed. Later on, we'll re-visit the most popular feature requests in the "Open for Votes" status and bring them to our Product Team.

To other Sellers who see this feature, please “like” the post and reply with a use case that your business would have. This will help to signal that this feature request is even more important to address. 

Thank you for your patience and for bringing this to our attention. We are committed to continually improving our services and ensuring that our platform meets your needs.

[SSB_YVR]

I had not thought of this, but now... YES! I would love to see this!!! 

The way we have our KDS set is that when we mark an order as complete it sends an alert to our third party delivery partners to fetch a driver. All to often we will accidentally mark an order as complete when we are simply trying to read the note.