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Q&A: Ask us anything about Square for Restaurants

Hello Seller Community!

 

On June 15th, 2021, we hosted a Square for Restaurants Q&A with 

 

Ask us about Square for Restaurants

 

Sheโ€™ll be online on June 15th at 3PM GMT to answer all your questions about Square for Restaurants with Linda Ling (@pastalavista) the Product Marketing Manager for Square for Restaurants.

 

As Product Marketing Manager, Linda helps sellers to understand the benefits of Squareโ€™s features and product.

 

A few example questions:

 

  • How can I optimise Square for Restaurants for outdoor dining? 
  • Whatโ€™s the advantage of using Square for Restaurants Plus?
  • How can I use the new KDS system to streamline our workflow in the kitchen?
Tra
Community Manager, Square
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Best Answer

Thank you everyone who participated in our Q&A today and I hope your questions were answered! Youโ€™ve given great suggestions about how we can improve our Square for Restaurants and KDS product that weโ€™ll be sharing with the team.

 

To wrap up, hereโ€™s a summary of a few themes I saw in the questions:

 

Square Register and Restaurant Plus

 

We know many of you are looking to use Square for Restaurants Plus on the Square Register. By the end of 2021, we are planning to have full functionality of Square for Restaurants Plus available on Square Register. In the meantime, we are releasing Plus features as we finish engineering work on them, which means new features will be continuously rolled out through the year. Currently, the Plus features that are available on Square Register include item availability, table timers and colours, category rollups in sales reports, and live sales. Keep in mind that all Dashboard features, including shared settings and advanced reports are compatible with Square Register.

 

More functionalities for KDS

 

Thank you for all your feedback on KDS. There are a number of features that our product and engineering team are evaluating. Weโ€™ll be sure to share all your suggestions with the team so they can be looked at when weโ€™re considering our road map.


Again, thank you for your participation. If you have any additional questions, please check out our guide.

View Best Answer >

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Beta Member

Hello

 

last week I had a problem of the bills were double counted due to different staff have closed the check in different station within 2 mins. So it added up the final gross and net sale and we only realised in next day.

 

but the only way I clear it was to refund in the next day. But then it recorded a refund.

 

is there anyway, i can void these entries instead of refund?

 

thank you 

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Hi @AKAThank you for your question. Unfortunately you can only void a bill that is still open, so if itโ€™s been closed, refunding would be the only option.

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Beta Member

Hi,

 

KDS coursing would be great - As with Fresh where you could have C1 C2 and so on.

 

KDS ticket joining. - The ability to join tickets together when customer order from the same table separately.

 

KDS ticket accept - Be great if when a new KDS order arrives its flashes and keeps playing a sound until one of the staff accept it.

 

KDS - The ability to block certain iPads for sending tickets to KDS, with Fresh you set the KDS up as a printer so in my set up where I have 3 bar iPads that I don't want to print KDS drinks tickets but my 4 floor iPads I do I had that option.

 

Table ordering - As well as the QR code it would be great if you could have a landing page where the customer could select their table from a drop down list?

 

Other than that great system. Thanks

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Hi @tomadams7757! Thank you for your fab feedback on KDS, this is all super helpful, and weโ€™re so glad youโ€™re using KDS so thoroughly! I will pass this feedback onto our product and engineering team to make sure itโ€™s on their radar when it comes time to look at our roadmap. 

 

Lastly, that is great feedback on table ordering that we will pass back onto our product team. Thank you for sharing!

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Beta Member

Hi

 

1.) Is there a date for when restaurants plus will be available on the register ?

 

2.) Is there a date for a label printing feature for individual items on the square KDS ? 

 

Thanks

 

Mike

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Hi @MJAYS! Thank you for your questions. For your first question, by the end of 2021, we are planning to have full functionality of Square for Restaurants Plus available on Square Register. In the meantime, we are releasing Plus features as we finish engineering work on them, which means new features will be continuously rolled out through the year. Currently, the Plus features that are available on Square Register include item availability, table timers and colours, category rollups in sales reports, and live sales. Keep in mind that all Dashboard features, including shared settings and advanced reports are compatible with Square Register.

 

For your second question, weโ€™ve heard this request from other sellers as well, and itโ€™s something that our product and engineering team are looking into actively. We canโ€™t share a specific timeline right now, but stay tuned for more updates!

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Hi 

Since last week I have been unable to differentiate which categories print through to our kitchen printer.

Is there something I am doing wrong?

Also I am enjoying the self serve/order aspect of the POS. I think it is something that our industry will heavily rely on in the future to keep overheads down, and especially with finding new staff so hard in these current times. Just wondering, as a lot of my customers struggle with QR codes, are there any small table top kiosks that square integrate with?

 

Many thanks 

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Hi @3pigeons! Thank you for your questions. For your first question, we did have a bug last week that was affecting how tickets were being printed. A fix was implemented that prevented old items from being printed when new ones are sent. However, if you send more than 10 courses at the same time, they will appear out of order and course lines wonโ€™t be bolded anymore. This issue will be addressed in an upcoming release. If youโ€™re still encountering an issue, please try troubleshooting or resetting your printer. 

 

For your second question, we do not currently integrate with any small tabletop kiosk partners, but that is great feedback that we will pass onto our product and partnerships team. In the meantime, one possible workaround would be to create a very restricted set of permissions within Team Management that would basically only allow someone to place an order and checkout, and then deploy iPads at your customer tables that would allow them to self-serve. 

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Super Seller

When will it be likely for Restaurants to work fully (premium plans) on Register?

 

When will there be a way to allow custom sorting of modifiers in items, instead of by alphabetical.

 

Will we ever have more flexibility with table timers? We use them to guide staff when to offer more rounds of drinks but right now that runs out after 2 rounds. Would be good if the timers could reset when new items are added to the bill, or be given the choice to manually reset it, or the choice to trigger a timer from a preset selection of times (eg I would set up 5 and 30 mins, that way if a table wants 5 mins to decide on their order but the staff member currently dealing with them is ending their shift during that time, someone else can attend to it). Having a more visual notification of a timer being reached would be good, perhaps a notification bar along the top that could optionally persist and be tapped to hide?

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Hi @artizansty! Thank you for your questions. For your first question, similar to what I told @MJAYS, by the end of 2021, we plan to have full functionality of Square for Restaurants Plus available on Square Register. In the meantime, we are releasing Plus features as we finish engineering work on them, which means new features will be continuously rolled out through the year. Currently, the Plus features that are available on Square Register include item availability, table timers and colours, category rollups in sales reports, and live sales. Keep in mind that all Dashboard features, including shared settings and advanced reports are compatible with Square Register.

 

For your second question, thank you for your excellent feedback. I will pass this onto the product and engineering team for their roadmap consideration. 

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Super Seller

Few Questions/Feature-requests..

1. Reservation system - Square appointment should be more Square-for-restaurant Table booking friendly. At present only option is to get licence for as many users as many tables we have in restaurant. I would prefer this licence to be part of Square-for-restaurant-plus or any other package.

2. Square-KDS: Can KDS we available for Android screens as well? We prefer more and more screens to be added inside Kitchen and adding so many ipads inside kitchen is not economically feasible. Also there is limit of connecting ipads to biggers screens.

 

3. Discounting feature:

- Square for restaurant do not have features of adding discount based on the need/criteria. Only option to add doscount based on criteria is for automatic discounts. Can we not get a feature same as automatic discount, but to get an option to trigger them based on need. In restaurant we need to provide discount on full menu based on demand. e.g. 2 for 1 on food and non-alcoholic drinks on certain days when presented a tastecard. 

All these discounts are on demand or on certain criteria based. Hence these can not be added as automatic.

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Hi @namastewatford ! Thank you for your questions. Let me address them in the order you asked:

 

  1. We are aware of the request for some sort of reservation system, and we are evaluating if this is something we will be able to support. Stay tuned!
  2. Similarly, weโ€™ve also heard from multiple people about the request for KDS to be available on different device types. This is something our product and engineering teams are actively evaluating. 
  3. Weโ€™ve been working on creating new types of discounts over the last year. Check out โ€œCreate a Limited Time Discountโ€ from this article, and let me know if that helps suit what youโ€™re looking for 
  4. Thank you for the feedback on gift cards. I understand this can be a bit confusing. I will pass this onto the product and engineering teams to make sure they are aware!
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Super Seller

Is it 3pm GMT or 3pm BST (current UK timezone) ?

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Hey @namastewatford, thanks for flagging that! It'd be 3PM BST rather than GMT actually. I'll make sure to note that in the original post. 

Tra
Community Manager, Square
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Super Seller

another Question I have regarding Gift Cards handling. This might be for all Square system as well.

 

I will ask this using a scenario

1. I issue a gift card to a customer worth say ยฃ20. There was no amount taken from customer (100% discount)

2. Customer uses this gift card against a meal and drink. ยฃ10 meal and ยฃ10 drink and pays using the gift card.

3. System based on the items setting,

     - shows 5% VAT for meal - ยฃ0.50

     - shows 20% VAT for alcohol - ยฃ2.00

4. End of day report shows this ยฃ20 as sale.

    -- I can exlcude ยฃ20 from sale by looking at the gift card sale.

5. Tax report shows ยฃ2.5 of VAT in the total. There is no way to distinguish this ยฃ2.50 from the tax report

 

Now I have to pay ยฃ2.5 to UK Gov for a transaction which was effectively a no revenue for us.

 

My question is how do we overcome this kind of situation when we can not control which gift card is used for what.

One way this can help us if we are able to create report against all gift-cards, transactions and applied taxes against those. So we can include/exclude those in VAT submissions.

 

any other suggestions welcome

 

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Super Seller

what is joining link ?

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Admin

Hey @namastewatford, the event is text-based so we'll be sharing all the answers here on this thread! I'll make sure to tag you in so you'll get a notification as well. 

Tra
Community Manager, Square
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Hi everyone, apology for the short notice but we're running a bit behind today. Thank you for all your questions so far, we'll be sharing the answers shortly. Stay tune! 

Tra
Community Manager, Square
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Square

Best Answer

Thank you everyone who participated in our Q&A today and I hope your questions were answered! Youโ€™ve given great suggestions about how we can improve our Square for Restaurants and KDS product that weโ€™ll be sharing with the team.

 

To wrap up, hereโ€™s a summary of a few themes I saw in the questions:

 

Square Register and Restaurant Plus

 

We know many of you are looking to use Square for Restaurants Plus on the Square Register. By the end of 2021, we are planning to have full functionality of Square for Restaurants Plus available on Square Register. In the meantime, we are releasing Plus features as we finish engineering work on them, which means new features will be continuously rolled out through the year. Currently, the Plus features that are available on Square Register include item availability, table timers and colours, category rollups in sales reports, and live sales. Keep in mind that all Dashboard features, including shared settings and advanced reports are compatible with Square Register.

 

More functionalities for KDS

 

Thank you for all your feedback on KDS. There are a number of features that our product and engineering team are evaluating. Weโ€™ll be sure to share all your suggestions with the team so they can be looked at when weโ€™re considering our road map.


Again, thank you for your participation. If you have any additional questions, please check out our guide.

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