Square Terminal New Feature for Modes?

[samkw]

I had a bit of a fire drill this morning.  My employee who uses Square Terminal could not use the terminal for transactions.  I had to race over to the remote location to debug the issue and found that Square had pushed out a new feature in how modes are setup/used on Terminal.  The fix was to log out of the employee's account, log in with my owner's account, and then go to More > Settings > (Terminal/Account) > "+" to create a new Mode.  And then I could log out of my owner's account and back in with the employee's account.  

I'm ok with this new feature, however, I didn't have any heads up that this was coming.  I travel a lot and thankfully I was in town to triage the situation.  We use Square for Appointments at our brick and mortar location, but our Square Terminals are used for remote POS item sales.  Not sure if this usage pattern is relevant to the issue we experienced today.

Did anyone know that this new feature was pushed out this week and/or get any heads up from Square?  I can't seem to find anything online about this.  Everything was fine on Thursday.  We didn't use it yesterday/Friday of this week, so I'm not exactly sure when the change went into effect, but it was in the last two days.

[ryanwanner]

Hello @samkw !

Mode switching is being rolled out in groups of merchants, yes. In all honesty I'm very surprised that there wasn't an alert that your systems were going to update.

That said, I was part of the beta of this, and I never remember any conversation about employee logins failing after the modes were enabled. From an employee standpoint, I don't believe there should have been any difference in operations. I'd like to tag the project lead @Marco on this. He would be able to lend more insight.

[Marco · Accepted solution]

@samkw I’m so sorry this happened, but I’m really glad you were in town to help your employees.

Thank you for reporting this issue—I’d love to gain a better understanding of what happened. With the introduction of modes, your POS system should automatically log in to the previous experience (most likely into Appointment Mode before you went in to troubleshoot).

You mentioned needing to log in as the owner to create a new mode so your employee could log back in. While the owner requirement to create a new mode is expected, I’m curious why that step was necessary in the first place. Before the introduction of modes, what was you and your employees' typical workflow?

My initial guess is that your employee arrived and found the device in Appointment Mode. Since they needed to make a sale, they would log out and log back in, expecting to access the vertical selection. However, with the mode switcher, signing out and back in is no longer necessary, so they reached out to you for assistance.

For mode switching, they should be able to go to More → Settings, where there should be a box at the top to switch modes.

You may need to enable their permissions to do so, though.