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Appointments Feature Request: Disable tipping on items - calculate tip based on cost of service(s)

Appointments Feature Request: Disable tipping on items - calculate tip based on cost of service(s)

 

The title of this post has been edited from the original: Tips should only be calculated on the service part of a sale, not retail

 

We are a service based business. We provide a service and our customers tip us on that service. But we also sell retail (skincare, lifestyle) items that customers should not tip on.

 

When our customer comes in for a 90min facial and during check out decides to buy some recommended products also their balance can jump form $130 to $280 very easily. So we now have a $280 balance with services and products, the customer swipes their card and the tip screen suggests a few % options..

 

Scenario 1, Wrong - 20% tip on total sale

$280 + 20% ($56) gratuity = $336

 

Scenario 2, Correct - 20% tip on Service only

$130 service + 20% ($26) service gratuity = $156 + $150 retail = $306

 

Unless we ring an extra transaction to separate retail from service sales, our customer gets ripped off. We make more money, Square makes more money but our customer got ripped off by $30 in Scenario 1.

 

The solution we previously offered to Square was to let items be "tip(able)" the same way items are currently "tax(able)"

 

Any thoughts from the Square team?

88 Comments

Hello @Bobby2414

 

Welcome to the Seller Community! This is a great question, but unfortunately the tip settings in the app apply to every transaction.

 

I definitely understand why you want this feature. There have been a few news articles about the pressures of tipping on an iPad. Having the tip screen appear for a customer buying a shirt can be awkward. 

 

I've gone ahead and moved this thread to the Idea Exchange board. From here we will track feedback from other Square sellers making this request. 🙂

Any Update on this? It's a basic function that most other point of sale platorms offer. It appears unprofessional and inconvenient that the total "tippable amount" includes retail sales. Services should be the only "tippable" item. Running two transactions, or turning off tip percentages are not good work arounds. Having tip percetage buttons for our customers to click is important because it helps us get A LOT more tips. A typical service for me is over $300, and retail could be up to $100 or more.  These are large amounts of money to not have accurate tipping in percetages. I could potentially lose out on hundreds of dollars per day without precalculated tip percetage buttons.

I've been waiting years for Square to offer a more straight forward way of handling tips and commission payments when the person being paid/tipped does not process payments at the register, our front desk staff does. I have a dog hotel, daycare and grooming facility. What I've been doing is pulling transaction reports and then manually sorting the transactions that have a groom service. We have our groom service with our groomers names as variables so we know who completed that groom and should get credit for it. 

 

When preparing payroll:

  • I go to reports
  • I choose the time period of the current payroll.
  • I pull the item sales summary report.
  • I use excel to sort by category (in my case grooming)
  • I then split this report by groomers, which are the item variables. i.e. Groom (Jane), Groom (Melissa), Groom (John).

With this information I can now create a commission report fairly easy. It's when tips get involved that it becomes way more cumbersome and possible errors can occur, like the very costly one I realized I've been doing for years this morning.

 

For tips:

  • With my pay period time period selected, I go to transactions.
  • I export this report to excel.
  • I sort by tip. Remove everything that doesnt have a tip.
  • I then sort by description.
  • I can then start plucking out each groom as they pertain to the groomer and have the associated tip. 
  • Once that's sorted, I then have a total tips payable to one of our groomers. 

This is the best solution I've found but it is teadous and I errors have been made in the past. We were having issues with clients tipping for a grooming service on the full ticket amount. I instructed our front desk to start refunding clients who inadvertently leave $50 tips on $50 grooms. This pay period, when I pulled the report and had a ton of refunded tips, I relaized that refunded tips still appear as a positive amount on the transaction reports. They also appear as a negative amount. However, I was paying out any and all refunded tips for years not knowing the report generated this way. I incorrectly assumed that once a transaction was refunded it would only appear negative. Now, it makes sense why it doesnt but ouch, this simple error has probably cost me thousands. 

 

Square, please, please, please come up with a native solution for exporting these reports. I am sure other businesses have 1099 contractors with tips that don't handle the register. We can't be the only business that takes payments in this fashion. Or, any business out there that operate like us have a better way of doing this? 

Anyone?

Admin

Hi @dogtownmia! Sorry for the delayed response and thanks for hanging tight!

 

Using employee management might make sorting through tips much easier! With employee management, you can set up passcodes for each employee for tracking purposes. When your receptionist is checking out your customers, the receptionist could have a list of each employee's passcode and enter the code of the employee that provided the service. That way, the sale is tracked to the correct employee (tip included).

 

If you don't want to use Employee Management, the only other thing you could do is to keep track of tips manually, outside of Square.

 

Let me know if you have other questions! Maybe one of our sellers can jump in and speak to this?

Please fix! Tipping feature needs to recognize Services are separate from Retail. I own a massage and wellness business. Tipping on services is customary however if retail product is added to the sale the tip is calculated on the total of the two and should not be. Currently I have to do two separate transactions...charge the customer's card twice. This is an unprofessional work around. Please Square fix this. Has anyone figured out a better way around it for now? 

Square Community Moderator

Hi @SMW

 

Thanks for this feedback. At this time, I wasn't able to find any other workarounds in the Community around this but I see how this would be a useful feature based on how your business works.

 

I'll make sure the Product team is able to see your request and your post will remain open for other sellers to add feedback to as well. 

 

 

We're having the same problem. This clearly is not beyond the technical abilities of the engineers and is insanely disrespectful of final customers and unaccommodating to Square users. We've run $125,000 through Square in the last 12mos and generated $3,600 of fees to Square. For the maybe $2000 of erroneous overtipping in that time and the approx $60 that generated for Square (and the unknown ill-will caused to us and loss of return customers), is Square willing to lose the extra $3,540 in fees? Because I'm ready to switch providers. Please report on any update.

Please please move forward with this feature. It is the reason I left square last year. I'm a salon owner and it was embarrassing to have a ticket for $75 for service and $200 for products and the tip gets calculated for $275!!! We should NEVER expect people to tip on products!!! that's ridiculous. my clients complained and would have to use a calculator or have me calculate the tip for them... but the reality is we shouldn't even be having a conversation about tipping--it should be the customer's choice and should be a silent one... instead, I would have to warn them "just so you know, this system applies the tip to the entire purchase, your service today was $75, so if you would like to tip, please be aware of that."

it is so silly to have this conversation, and VERY awkward. please update!

Square Community Moderator

Hi @cultivatedcurl

 

I completely understand the need for this to run your business. I will go ahead and pass this along to our Product Team again. Thank you so much for your feedback.