limit order per day

[maan]

Hi, I make baked goods which I can only take or accept 3 dozen per day. How can I limit orders per day? Thanks for the answer. 

[ryanwanner]

Hello @maan !

You're opening a can of worms with this question, my friend. 🙂

The first question I have to ask you is this: do you only sell individually or can someone come in and order dozens at a time? If you only sell individually, this is going to be relatively easy.

When you set up your item, you'll see a link titled Manage Stock. If you click/tap on that, you can enter your item count. Once you save the item, Square will keep track of every sale and decrease the count. Once that count hits zero, the item will show as Sold Out on your website and have a red Sold Out line when you try to order it from your register. You can do this for however many items you want. Every morning, once your baked goods are ready, you can go into your Point of Sale and update the counts for what you're selling that day. This is how I do things in my store.

If you're selling by the dozen along with individuals, this is where things get interesting. Square doesn't do a global inventory count, just at a per item level. So if you set up a dozen croissants as a separate item from a single croissant, your inventory counts between the two items won't sync; selling one dozen croissants won't take 12 off of your single croissant count. This is something that's been requested quite a few times in the Ideate section of this site, so hopefully it'll show up eventually. One workaround I've found is to manually reduce the inventory count when a sale happens. Not ideal for sure. 

For in person sales, there is another way. I assume you give a price break for dozen sales versus individual sales. You can set up automatic discounts where Square will lower the price automatically as more of an item or category is ordered. So if a customer wants 12 croissants, you would ring in the individual croissants x12 and Square will discount to the right price. This also solves the inventory count issue I mentioned. At this time, this isn't something available on the online side of things, though.

Clear as mud, right?

[maan]

Hello Ryan, 

Thank you for quick response. My question was I can only take 3 dozen of baked goods per day. Once I met my limit for Monday (for example 2 customers ordered 1 1/2 dozen each of them) the Monday schedule will close and the customers can book on the next day which is Tuesday. Is that make sense?  Thank you 

[ryanwanner]

Aah gotcha @maan. I was thinking you had multiple products. 

I think your best bet would be to use the preorder functionality Square offers. Look for the Square Online Settings section at this link for setting it up. If you take in person orders you can still use the same item. The inventory count will still be reduced. 

With preorder, you can plan your menu for the week, create the items, set the item count at 36, then set the date people can pick up. 

The only downfall right now is that you can’t have recurring preorders. You’ll have to go in and set up each day each week. Overall though I think this is your best bet.