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Upcoming Square Register Features and Workarounds

Hello I was wondering if someone from Square could comment on a few features that are currently not available but neccesary for most restaurants and what the workarounds were. 

 

- How do you course? Modifiers?

 

- How do you count customers? This is extremely valuable reporting data. 

 

- What do you do with checks that are accidentally closed out? There doesnt seem to be a way to re-open them. 

 

- Is there a way to adjust pricing by time? We have a large happy hour menu with many price changes. Having modifiers or seperate items leads to many mistakes.

 

- Any chance of some sort of visual table map in the future? A list of numbered tickets ends up generating mistakes in a faced paced environment.

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Beta Member

I love all those and also think it needs each of those features

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Square

@Squaretest - Thanks for taking the time to share your thoughts, and I'm happy to follow up with you on your requests. Check out my comments below:

 

- How do you course? Modifiers?

While we don't specifically have a courses features, if you use the Open Ticket feature, you can add new items to the ticket throughout dinner service. Each time a new item is added, a ticket will be sent back to the kitchen if you have Order Tickets enabled. 

 

- How do you count customers? This is extremely valuable reporting data.  

Would you mind sharing a bit more about what you mean? Are you looking for a way to record the amount of customers at each table? If so, you could consider creating an item modifier set for amount of people, it seems like it would be a reasonable feature (as we don't offer this exact feature). 

 

- What do you do with checks that are accidentally closed out? There doesnt seem to be a way to re-open them. 

Great feedback. We don't currently offer the ability to re-open an Open Ticket. Having said that, of course you can issue partial refunds or recharge a customer's card. 

 

- Is there a way to adjust pricing by time? We have a large happy hour menu with many price changes. Having modifiers or seperate items leads to many mistakes.

This is a pretty popular feature request, I'd suggest subscribing to this thread for updates on this feature. 

 

- Any chance of some sort of visual table map in the future? A list of numbered tickets ends up generating mistakes in a faced paced environment.

I don't have any sort of ETA for this functionality, but this is certainly a feature that has been requested by our sellers (especially sit down restaurants). 

 

While I realize that most of my responses are workarounds, or acknowledge of your feature requests, you definitely raises many compelling points. If these features are essential to your business operation, I would highly recommending checking out our recent partnership with TouchBistro. They're a company that focuses specifically on restaurants. You can take advantage of their POS software, but our analytics and payment processing. Here is more info, and hope this helps!


Sean
he/him/his
Product Manager | Square, Inc.
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Hey Sean, thank you for the reply!

 

- Coursing: sometimes its valuable for kitchens to have all the info one a single ticket, reasons include physical space on the ticket rail, the fact that people order apps and entrees at the same time and ease of just looking for the course information in a single place. that being said, a modifier that doesnt print on the customer receipt will probably be an acceptable workaround.

 

- Counting Customers: the number of actual people that dine with us is a metric that we use for average cover price (not average bill). It really helps to know how much each customer is spending at a given time of day/week. In most restaurant POS systems, when you open a new ticket/table you are prompted for the number of guests immediatley after. 

 

-  Reopening checks: Wrong check closed out to wrong card! This happens more than Id like in a fast paced environment, I could see it being more with square, especially with no visual table map (currently you just offer an ordered list of tables/tickets). Is this something one could reasonably expect in the future?

 

- Happy hour changes: sounds like it could be on its way, fingers crossed

 

- Touchbistro: too cumbersome, doesnt feel like a real iOS app. Just look at the order screen compared to yours.

 

Based on how clean and simple your interface is (huge plus in my book) you dont take new features requests without a lot of thought. I feel square is very close to being very powerful for a sit down restraurant environment but its just not quite there. It certainly is much closer than a year ago so I will keep an eye out for new features.

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I agree only features lacking for me is happy hour and reopening of closed ticket. With those two that would be golden!!!! I agree also touchbistro i messed around with it last night.  Very very fumbled together and confusing square is very simple cut dry. Which is perfect for speediness of high traffic. I use it in a bar that has high yeild on weekend nights of 2-250 people at one time with 5 bartenders using two square terminals with very quick easy pace. Another nice thing which i dont think would be hard is when you do a discount u can select catagories that the discount applys too for ex employee gets 20% food but not alcohol u hit 20% enployee discount. It discounts food on their ticket but not the alcohol

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I appreciate this info...

I'll add that I have Touch Bistro for my restaurant, and we started a food truck with Square.  I am now wishing that I could switch over to Square in my restaurant, but it is lacking these important features for "fine dining" environments.  I have been using Touch Bistro, and I think it works pretty well, but I do really like the idea of the more streamlined functionality of Square.  I also really do NOT want to integrate credit card payments.  You pay more to do that, and things can go very wrong.  We currently manually pay our cards in TB, and process outside the POS on a chip credit card machine.

 

I'm just putting in my vote to see Square add some of these features, so we can use it in our dinner house!

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I'd really like the count customers feature for my quick service restaurant to understand how many customers are coming per day and true sales per customer. Currently I only get sales per ticket but without a way to count customers per ticket I don't have the level of detail to better understand trends. Please add it to teh new features list. Thanks    

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I built my own “Course “ line into the system. Made a many item tab that says COURSE and put a zero price point on it. They ring the apps, hit the course line and the. Add the entrees. Works like a charm😊

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Super Seller

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Ive been recommeneded touchbistro many times, I found the interface pretty clunky and confusing compared to the ease and cleanliness of square. It doesnt feel like a proper iOS app, just another re-hash of all the terrible restaurant POS systems currently available (aloha, micros, etc)

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Yes! Please add all of these! Can anyone tell me how to add a gratuity? 

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In the Activity section, top left corner there is a place to add tips to tickets.

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Admin

Quick update to one feature requested in this thread: Automatic Disounts are now available for Square Point of Sale! 🎉

 

You can use this feature to set up a happy hour, or to create other limited-time discounts.

 

For details check out this Product Update post Automatic Discounts for Square Point of Sale app.

️ Helen
Seller Community Manager

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