Internal Accounts / Complimentary items

[FortressMelb]

Does anybody have best practice or an idea on how to do Internal Accounts? For example, we have a Marketing Department, a Technical Department, and an Operations Department who all have 'accounts' for food and beverage to use with clients within the venue. On our previous account we would ring up the items and add to an account (called debtor on that system), and the staff member responsible was not charged anything. Once a month the Finance Department would comp or write off that Debtor account.  This would also be true for accounts such as 'Wastage'.

Would using Comp Reasons named after the department be best practice?  i.r Comp Reason / Marketing Expense.

[Seamus]

Hey @FortressMelb!

Square's ecosystem doesn't yet feature specific ways to manage company accounts, though you can store a card on file to a customer contact.

You could then process a transaction with the stored card on file through the POS app, or as an Invoice. If you're using the app you could also check out the Open Ticket function that lets you add additional items to an order before it gets paid off.

The Comp function is intended to be used to remove the cost of an item from a customer's bill, so I'm not sure its intended to work as a means of accounting for wastage. This is how we describe it in our support centre:

"Applying a Comp to an item removes the cost of the item from the customer bill. Items can be compensated to fix a mistake, or as a goodwill gesture. A record of the comped item will display in your online Square Dashboard.

Example: A server accidentally adds ‘Roast Chicken’ instead of ‘Fried Chicken’ to a customer’s order, but doesn’t realise the mistake until after the order is prepared. The server comps the ‘Roast Chicken’ and rings in the correct order – which they might also comp as an apology for an additional wait."

[FortressMelb]

Thanks Seamus!

It sounds as if comp is still the right space for 'free' items though, which are given out to those authorized people and my thoughts are that we would need an actual real card for Card on File payments?  In reality these accounts are never paid off, they are written off.  How about for the use case where a customer buys a 'ticket' to an event that is entry and a free drink. What do we think is the best way of doing this, comp/discount/$0 item.

We are complicated 😤

[Seamus]

@FortressMelb you know what, maybe a 100% discount might actually be the better way to approach this, rather than comping every single item separately!

So you can add all your items to a sale in the Point of Sale, then apply a 100% discount once everything has been added, then run the transaction through as $0. This would need to be done on the app though as a sale, from memory you won't be able to process a $0 emailed invoice.

Is the main goal here just to make sure that $0 sale is recorded and your item inventory levels are all correct? If so a 100% discount would do the trick! Check out more on creating discounts here, let me know if you have any more questions!