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?

[lizonthefarm]

My 1099 does not match my total sale report>

[obsidianandsage]

your 1099 does not show cash sales only card sales

[soccersedge]

Hi,

For our retail store, we have to book orders with our vendors 9 months in advance. We have just started to use the "Purchase Orders" tools in the Square inventory management section. Something that would be helpful would be to get a report of all of these future purchases across the different vendors.

Example being: Is there a report that I can run that will show me how many (both quantity and $ amount) of Adult Footwear is scheduled to arrive in November 2023 across all of our different vendors?

Not only would this be good to know, but this will help us decide if we need to clear out some inventory to make way for the incoming inventory. This can also help with projecting cash flow statements, etc..

Happy to chat about this further if you need additional information or other examples.

Thank you!

[acelwyn]

Here is a snapshot of our situation -

We have 2 locations and a website, we purchase from over 150 different Vendors, and stock over 3500 items.

Things that Square could improve that would be helpful to our business -

Reports that download to Excel

    - We need to be able to sort by item, current stock, vendor, location, the ability to choose the sales over specific timeframes (ex. 6 months, 30 days)

    - Sales reports by vendor, time frame, and location

Purchase orders that show all items from a particular vendor directly on the purchase order page

The ability to transfer stock between locations

Current reporting/purchasing options are not very useful for inventory control.

Thank you for your help

[Mbeee129]

I am looking for a way to see my total accounts receivable for my recurring invoices on a weekly, monthly and yearly basis. Is this something that is in the works? 

[tammie1]

Hello--I would like to be able to see my sales and on hand quantity at the same time/on one report.

Also if there was a way to put in more than one time frame to look at, ie last 4 weeks ty and next 8 weeks ly

I am new to the square system so if these already exist i apologize.

thanks

tammie

[obsidianandsage]

I am not sure I am using the reporting features to its full potential and would love to have some actual training on the program.  I would like to be able to create reports in one swoop that show me what i need for the end of the year and taxes.  to not have to do "work arounds" to get the information needed.  I am going on 3 years with square now and love it otherwise. also would love there to be more accounting features so I don't have to pay for a separate system like Quickbooks.  couldn't something like quickbooks be integrated in to this program rather than having to do it separate?

[GABRIEL_COHEN]

Given the recent IRS confusion regarding taxable vs. non-taxable income, is Square going to allow businesses to include their registration paperwork along with the 1099-K forms Square submits, in order to distinguish between business and personal income? This would not only benefit sellers by preventing serious (and difficult to clean up) reporting errors, but would also eliminate any resulting legal liability for both Square and the taxation agencies.

[thedip]

I would love to be able to add "cost of goods sold" to each item and have that show up on reports. I tried adding a custom attribute but I cannot get that custom attribute to show up when I run a report, thus making it useless. How can I get "cost of goods sold" on items to show up on reports?

[Pupusasforall]

I have more than one store brand in my square, and I integrating my online sales from third party delivery apps ( uberests, doordash, etc) via an integrator ( deliverect).  On the sales reports by source, all uber eatsorders are combined as if they are coming from one brand.  It would be great if the sales could be linked by the brand that they were ordered on Ubereats.

[ElevationM]

I switched over to boulevard recently, because they offered better options for multi service booking, better customization of client pricing, and easier checkout for multi service appointments. but they are lacking in other areas, and I’d like to come back to square. But I’m looking for some of the optimization features that blvd has: For example, if someone books a massage, a facial and a sauna treatment it would be nice to have them streamlined to be able to combine them together. Or if a couple comes in to be able to checkout together. As it is now we have to run the card multiple times, or void one service and ad another service elsewhere. This can really bog down the checkout process. 
Also, if someone buys a prepaid package, there’s no way to zero it out or record the price as zero, it has to be “comped” and that usually messes up our numbers end of year. I hope these things make sense. Basically looking for better streamlined optimizations for booking multi service/multi provider  appointments, and better functionality for editing prices. 

[perkits]

Weather!!  Our business is very weather driven and it would be nice to be able from the user side, or location services to add Avg temp and conditions (64 Sunny) So if we are looking at a report and see a slow day that it may be attributed the weather. (32 Cloudy)

[BofBArtStudio]

Or any kind of notes that attribute to the sales for a given day.  For instance, any time there is a holiday like Martin Luther King day, our sales are very high those days compared to other days.  So when we look at reports, MLK Monday might show that it it is 98% higher than the previous Monday, for example.  That doesn't really help to understand why without some sort of note.  When it rains here (we live in the desert), people don't go out.  So normally, a sunny Saturday would be our best day, but a rainy Saturday could be our worst day.  If I compare this day to the same day last year or the same day last week, the report may not be clearly telling the story.  Or this year, Super Bowl is going to be in our town on a Sunday.  Normally Sunday is a big day for us, but we anticipate Sunday the 12th (two days before Valentine's Day) will be much slower than normal Sundays.  Also, sometimes Christmas falls on a Tuesday (normally a very slow day), but in 2022, Christmas was on a Saturday (normally the biggest day of the week).  So when we compare Saturdays, the numbers are out of wack.  

Notes to explain the big swing for a day vs the same day of the previous week, month or year,  would be very helpful.

[fushipoke]

We need a report that shows online tips and the employees they belong to. Currently we run an online tip report by time and mark down the amount of tips for each shift then run a report to see who worked each shift as a "togo" job put it in excel and tally up the total online tips for each togo employee for the week to run payroll.

This may require a way to assign online tips to certain jobs.

We also need a labor and tips report that shows each employees name and hours worked for each specific job.

Currently the labor and tips report only shows total pay and total hours worked by each employee nothing shows what job they worked without looking at each specific day.

We need to see how many hours each employee works for each specific job that week in order to do payroll. 

So for employees with multiple jobs we export the detailed report showing every shift and tally up hours for each employee by job in excel.

Because of the reports running payroll with Square is such a pain we contemplated switching back to shopkeep.

Also it would be nice to have more options in "custom reports", currently it really doesn't offer anything besides reorganizing the data of preset reports.

It would also be helpful to have inventory reports showing stock changes. ShopKeep (now lightspeed) had the best inventory tracking and reporting so it might be helpful for you folks to see what they did.

[Sharon_Daphna]

Can Square please come up with a way to include business registration documents along with 1099-K reporting? Perhaps you could have a place on the seller profile to upload PDFs of these documents and send them along with the 1099-K so the IRS and state taxation agencies could be made aware of business versus personal income. It is very time consuming and can also be costly to hire an enrolled agent to get through on the phone to clarify when a third party payment processor has reported business income in error. Only personal income should be reported, but I understand that Square reports all income. This is why I think this could be a good solution and absolve both Square and the taxation agencies of legal liability that comes with the taxation agencies sending out automated letters to businesses that are complying with tax law and should not receive them. I would be more inclined to use Square to invoice my clients rather than requiring checks if I had some assurance that Square would help my business by keeping reporting accurate and help the taxation agencies follow the tax laws.

[Mbeee129]

Where is the link to see this live or replayed?

[Tom]

Hey @Mbeee129, thanks for checking in. This Q&A is in writing only, within this thread. If you have any questions or feedback about reporting tools, please reply with them below.

The Reporting team will get back to you with an answer as soon as possible, and we'll post a summary of the main themes that came up as well.

Thank you for your patience as we look into more Q&A formats.

[morageek]

Many of us need EBT/SNAP. Are there really any plans to code it in?  That last option offered really sucked. It needs to be part of the Square programs.

[Stacelyn24]

I have a quick question.  I saw on reports they have a "appointment" tab.  I would like for each team member to see their re-booking percentage.  Is there a way they can see that on the dashboard of their app?  The reporting for this feature needs to take in consideration that we have clients that will book out multiple appointments in one sitting...so when they come back in they will not immediately re-book another appointment...I feel this is making the team member's percentage go down

[JaxonRay]

I need a receivables report. I need to filter, sort and export reports about received inventory. 

[Busyewefarm]

Can we get the option to print a report rather than just email to ourselves?  I have multiple selling events at various sales tax locations - I have to pull the different events to calculate taxes owed to several different locations.  It would save paper if I could remove the headers and footers.