Square Reporting Q&A: Get answers and influence product decisions!

[Tom]

Happy New Year, Seller Community! ✨

Effective and reliable reporting is crucial for the smooth operation of any business, and we recognize that there is always room for improvement with the reporting tools offered by Square.

This event was an opportunity to speak directly with @annakepler on the Square Reporting team, and contribute to how developments are prioritized throughout 2023.

On Wednesday, January 25, 2023 we hosted a Q&A to address questions and make sure your experiences are documented with the Reporting team's plans for the year ahead.

Not sure what to ask? Here are some example questions: 

• What is the best way to keep an eye on sales trends for my items?
• If I could do "_________" with reporting in the online Square Dashboard, that would save me so much time.
• How can I manage sales reports across multiple business locations?

[twentysixcafe]

Elevate the access to transactions / deposit reports from square, and make it easy to see the breakout of these deposits. This is vital for bookkeeping and taxes. When a deposit comes in from square, we have to split the deposit (eg credit card tips vs sales). In order to determine this amount for every (daily!) deposit from square, we have to navigate through an outrageous number of clicks and buried / non-obvious links to get this vital information that affects P&L and taxation. This is far too important to be buried the way it is.

These reports:

https://squareup.com/dashboard/square-card/activity/transfers

Should be first-class citizens in reporting.

[annakepler]

Thank you for sharing @twentysixcafe ! I apologize that what should be a straightforward process is highly complex today. I will take this back to the team. 

[Info1234]

Please add the ability to export all transactions into excel.  I would like to be about to choose any date range and export into excel. 

[annakepler]

Hi @Info1234 , we're currently in the process of adding functionality to our export for transactions. Currently, you have the ability to set ranges for transactions and export but there are some limitations we're hoping to remedy with our upcoming work.

[MaryJ]

Hi, I use Square for Restaurants and sell both taxable and non-taxable items.  It would be great if the register Daily Sales Report broke out Gross Sales by taxable and non-taxable.  Would save me from having to reference the sales tax report for each day when I enter my daily receipts into my accounting software.  I use this information to balance QuickBooks with Square when I file and pay my quarterly sales tax report.

[vinesandrushes]

I'd like the ability to filter based on day of the week in the sales summary report.  We've added days/hours of service and I don't have an easy way of tracking the gross sales for a specific period of time on a specific day.

I would also like a lot more flexibility of tracking category sales against staffing job types.  I need more information about profitability of staffing levels on different days.

[ibrogden]

A Sales Reporting enhancement that would be great is to be able to report on a rolling window (such as 10 days).

The report showing this week versus last week is not very useful at the beginning of the week, as it only comparing a day or two.

Basically, a report showing last 10 days versus the preceeding 10 days so I can see the trend.

BTW, very glad you FINALLY fixed the Android Sales Reporting issues! Now Android shows same results as iOS.

[SecondChanceOel]

What would really be helpful is an easy way to add an item category.  It's futile to try an add every item I have as inventory changes so rapidly and hardly ever 2 items the same.  I would like to see an option to add just a category like home repair,  toys,  furniture  etc . So I can just click and track the category an item is being sold from.  Also would need a way to track and print a report so I can see what category sells the best and when as well as what I should busy get rid of due to poor sales.  I'd also like a better breakdown of monthly sales and a way to print these every month for hard copy records and tax reports.  A way to print yearly reports with the option to NOT have it on a spreadsheet would be great. As said by others being able to easily retrieve prior year reports and sales is much needed.  Alot of us small businesses can't afford to pay for premium services so doing these things for all users is a must! We pay so much in fees for shoppers using cards it really cuts into profits. Thanks! Keep the l up the great work of improving things for us

[Craftinomicon]

Two things I would love: 

A restock report - A list of items sold daily that have additional inventory left to be restocked. If multiple of the same item are sold in a day, consolidate them with a quantity. 

An old inventory report: Show me things that have not been included in cycle counts in the last x amount of time. I would use this to ensure that older items where Square shows we have 1 - actually exist in the store. 

[lupine]

I run a service business and charge by the hour. I'd love a printable report that shows me the names of the clients and the number of minutes for each session. The Active Users report has the info IF I click on the participants number...but I have to do that meeting by meeting and haven't found any way to create a report that shows the names. 

[thegrapevine]

Is there a way to pull a customer’s purchase history or the receiving/sales history of a particular item?

[annakepler]

Hi @thegrapevine , you should be able to pull up a customer’s purchase in your Customer Directory in the Square POS app (Customers applet), or online dashboard (Customers->Directory). When viewing your Directory, you can click on an individual customer to review key details about them, including recent activity with links to each purchase. Hope this helps, but let me know if you have any follow-up questions.

[thegrapevine]

I see the list, but is there a way to see the price they paid, in the purchase history? I would like to have an interactive list, so that when a customer returns an item without a receipt, I could look at the history and initiate a return straight from the history.

I would also like to be able to review receiving for the day, with the costs and vendors visible. If that is a possibility. 

[acelwyn]

Have been a Square customer for many years and am happy to see some of the growth in reporting and additions such as being able to add item cost and vendor name.  However, none of the reports can let me filter by vendor to look at all of the items for that vendor.  With over 2000 items and 80 vendors, if I can't pull a report that shows me the items for that vendor, it's not very useful for me to see a report with over 2000 items.  Even if you could create a CSV that showed me item sales and had the vendor listed for all of the items, I could sort/filter that CSV on my own to look at sales for a particular group of items.

Please consider adding more functionality for filtering by vendor as it will greatly improve your reporting.  Thank you.

[Candlestore]

I agree, even if Square had Sub Categories for us to use you could have a Category and then use the Subcategory of a Vendor or Vendor code to sort the csv file with in the Items Detail CSV download.  Right now I have to merge by SKU my Catalog and my Details List in Google Sheets then do the sort to find what your describing.

[ccschocolates1]

I would like to see us being able to export reports that can give us the # of transactions per day/hour. Example: If I want to see if it's good for my business to be open at 7am, every day, I want a report to see how many transactions that are done in that hour. right now, I have to run a report for a time and date range and hover over every day to get the # of transactions. if you do an export it only gives you the $ amounts. If there is a way to do this, someone please tell me.

[RedkeyJunktion]

Good morning … is it possible to keep track of vendor sales?  I would like to be able to input a vendor number after each item. Seems that groups is the most similar but it appears the you have to input item prior to the sale into a group for that to work. Ideally we could input a price followed by a vendor number (our current system is inputting price into square and tracking the same price along with vendor number and description into a notebook and excel spreadsheet. 

[Candlestore]

Better Idea would be to put the Vendor Code before the item name.  Then you could do a report like the Items Detail CSV export from your Transactions tab.  Then in your CSV program you could sort the Items column by name, putting al the vendor items together.  The other option might be to make a Category of the Vendor Name or Code, problem with this is trying to look up the item if a Barcode falls off, you need to remember the Vendor or the Code to look in that Category.  Again if we had a Sub Category, we could put this code or a vendor name in there and we could sort by that code  or name.  Or have the main Category as the Vendor and the Sub Categories as the Type of Items.  

[bjfrentzel]

It would be great to be able to schedule emails of the various reports for one or multiple emails....

[annakepler]

Hi @bjfrentzel !
We are currently working on this feature and hope to have it available to our customers soon. Can I ask if any reports, in particular, is of most interest to you? Do the people you would be emailing these reports have login access to your Square Dashboard?

[TrayceAnn]

I would like to see an improvement with payment type reporting. Sometimes in-house gift cards are labeled as "other" sometimes they come up as "gift cards".  Some reports have an amount reported as "other" but when you go looking for those transactions, they don't seem to exist. It would be much more helpful to see exactly what payment types are coming in. 

Also - when I am checking sales, I would like to see the tabs/tickets that are out there and who is running them.