What system would be best? We are opening a retail space that will house 2 shops under one roof.

[Moondance]

Also, we each will have items on consignment. One shop will be mostly a coffee shop, at first. The other, mostly gift items. Are two separate bank accounts possible? 

Leaning toward a bare bones operation in terms of POS such as the original Square units that plugged in to a phone or a tablet but open to something more sophisticated.

Can the original Square units do inventory and consignment tracking?

Need a way to compare and contrast configurations, features, benefits, costs.

Do any systems accept PayPal?

Thanks for your help!

[VanKalkerFarms]

are the 2 "shops" 2 separate legal businesses?  that will play a big part in the answer.  if they are then you should not use one account.

the square stand, contactless reader, iPad, cash drawer, and a printer will be like $600. 

you can get by with just a phone and the free reader but then you won't have receipts and anywhere to organize cash.

the Square readers don't have anything to do with features of the app.  inventory works but consignment tracking is a different animal that isn't directly part of the Square POS system but people have found workarounds.

none take PayPal as a payment.

[Moondance]

Thanks for the quick response. Yes, 2 separate businesses but just one cash drawer, so to speak. For example, a person could buy a cup of coffee, a bagel and a piece of art. The art is paid to one shop, the consumables, the other.

Can you elaborate on the workarounds on the consignments?

[VanKalkerFarms]

it won't be good to have 2 businesses running thru one account.  tax purposes, both income tax, and sales tax.  bank deposits will be complicated.  reports and sales data will all be off.

I wouldn't recommend having it that way if they aren't the same business.  2 sperate accounts with Square would be best.

you can search here for more but I've seen using categories to assign to different people the items they are selling but consignment is a complicated situation depending on how many consignees you have to track.  I'm not sure as I don't so consignment sales so I don't have experience other than the few threads I've clicked on here.

[Moondance]

Are you suggesting that we essentially require customers to pay for different items separately? Some for one half of the store and some for the other? I can’t see how that wouldn’t be a turn off for our customers but maybe I misunderstand you.

[rsklar]

If the items you sell are always from the different "stores" than you can create items and assign them to a categry.  For example you might have your food items categorized as "FOOD" and all the food will show up under that report and you can split the money based on which 

You can also report by SKU and determine the monetary split that way.

Bob

[puka]

Hey @Moondance - Great questions. Only one bank account can be linked to a Square account so you would have to go the two account route regardless, if you are looking to have separate bank accounts. 

@VanKalkerFarms' suggestion would definitely require you to divvy up the shop between the two accounts. If you have two devices, you could potentially have one device stay logged into the account with coffee shop items and the other device stick with consignment items (or however else you would want to set that up).

@rsklar's suggestion also works, but again this is only if you want one Square account with all sales going into one bank account.

[Moondance]

Thank you to you both!

Some follow up questions:

I assume that if we really wanted to, we could have two accounts running on one set of hardware by logging out of one and then into the other?

Do any systems come with a cash drawer?

Might be a naive question but I assume that Square includes the same tracking/inventory/accounting features when it is a cash sale as it would for a cc transaction, yes?

[VanKalkerFarms]

you can run multiple accounts on one piece of hardware, but it isn't ideal as it takes at least 30 seconds to sign out and type in the other account and then sign in and have the POS populated from the cloud. 

One way around this that I do is to run the Beta of Square POS and the App Store version of Square POS.

Square tracks all sales and data regardless of payment method.