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How to change personal name not business name?

How to change personal name not business name?

I need help with this too, but the only option I can find under "Personal Information" is to change my business name. I have a typo and would like to correct It without having to start over with my online shop, etc. 

1 Verified Answer
EJ_
Verified Answer

Re: How to change personal name not business name?

@CKinkade Sorry for the late reply here,

 

 

Unfortunately you aren’t able to edit the legal name you used to activate your Square account. If you'd like to fix a typo with your activation name, you'll need to create a new Square account.

 

Fortunately the activation name is not public facing in any way. 

227 Comments

They don't care. I've reported them to the BBB. I've been asking to have my name corrected to my legal name since 2017!! Others were asking before me. It's a weird thing they're doing with this, there has to be some reason why they would choose to lose customer's over something so simple. But their explanation is always "sorry...we're working on it". 

Wait... So the current situation is still "we're working on a solution"???? The first post in this thread was over 3 years ago!!

 

I don't understand why this is not possible, did they make the account owner name a key in their database or something? That would be stupid, like who designed that??

 

I have a court order for legal name change and have been able to update my legal name in financial institutions, online services, etc. by contacting a person and Square is the only business/service/company that actually cannot do this.

 

Inconveniently surprised.

I’m wondering if it’s time to discuss whether there is a possibility of a class action lawsuit here. Most of the posts I see here are by women who have gotten married. This is sexist.

Changing a LEGAL name shouldn’t be this hard. If you (Square) cared about customer service all all you would make this a priority and fix it NOW!

I got divorced and have the legal paper work is there any way to change it? I use the square loans for my buisness If I start a new square account with the same social security will I still be eligible for the loans or will I need a year to get an offer?

Seeing this has been an issue for a lot of ppl and will continue to happen. Why is this not something someone is working on changing. 

Square is never going to change this, they’re doing nothing but smoke and mirrors. I made the jump to Shopify, highly recommend that to this...

Square Community Moderator

Hi there, @beautifulynaild - thanks for adding your voice in Support of these changes. While we don't have a shareable timline for announcement just yet, we can confirm that Square is looking to make significant changes to name editing ability. As soon as we have more info to share, we will reach back to everyone on this thread here.

 

We appreciate your patience!

Over three years later and still waiting for this update they are "working hard on fixing". 

I have a background in development and I suspect this is what's happening.

  • When Square's devs first wrote the code to handle "on-boarding" – setting up new user accounts – the "name" field in their user model was never intended to be editable, – eg. the value in that field was assumed to be constant. That's a bad assumption, but understandable considering that the people who probably made the call are guys who never had to consider all the circumstances under which a person might legally want (or need) to change their name.
  • Some other essential part of the user model – password stuff, authentication, tokens, etc. – probably relies on that name value remaining constant. Change the name, and all that other stuff breaks.
  • Ergo, letting the name be editable requires that the code around those other values be updated, or re-written to no longer require the user's name directly. That's enormously complex, and probably needs a data migration and some kind of "switch-over" date on which they change everything from the "old way" to the "new way".
  • That work is time-consuming, costly, high-risk, and does not generate any revenue for Square. That makes it a low priority from a business leadership standpoint. Despite what customer support and the devs themselves want to do, leadership would rather focus on new features and new ways to bring in revenue. Stuff that will cost them $X and is projected to return > $X in value.
  • Keeping things the way they are now only incurs the cost of a relatively small part of the customer base (us) being mad, and the support burden of the Square customer service people who have to deal with us. I'm sure the support folks are begging for resources to be put on solving this problem – so they don't have to deal with this hive of angry hornets anymore – and they're probably being told exactly what they're telling us. "We're working on it". Which probably means "we have one developer we are allowing to work on it during their downtime, and if they ever get those data migrations to pass well enough to not break everything, we might try it".

So yeah. It's probably not easy at all, but it is do-able, and there are likely plenty of people at Square who want to do it. They're just not being allowed, because it's high risk for low reward.

 

At this point your best bet is probably to move to another platform, delete & re-create all your stuff here under your actual name, or tweet at Alyssa Henry (@alyssahhenry - leader of product management, design and engineering for Square’s seller facing products) to ask her to prioritize this issue.

one addendum: based on @Joe's response a few hours ago, there might also be something like a full re-write of the user management system in the works, or something equally as big, into which they're planning to integrate the name change thing. This could be a re-write to pay off technical debt like the name thing, plus a bunch of other gremlins in legacy code that is breaking a lot, causing support issues, impeding the development of new features, etc. That kind of thing really can take "a few years" to do properly. If that's what's happening, it would be nice to hear about it in more concrete terms.