Need to capture customer name at time of sale

[winespotwa]

Square for restaurants, no online orders, just in-person.

I need to capture the customer name at time of sale.  Sometimes I get busy and forget.  I can search by cc number, but if it's a new card that doesn't work.  I need the system to require me to enter customer name.  Is this possible?

[Arie]

Heya @winespotwa,

Thanks for writing in with this question!

Right now, there isn't a way to require you to enter a customer's name for every sale. However, if you're printing order tickets, you can enable the option to enter customers' names via this guide. Can you let us know a bit more about your business and why you're collecting names? e.g to call out their order, or for your internal reporting? I'll keep an eye out for your reply 🙂

PS. I noticed it's your first post, welcome to our community 👋 

[winespotwa]

Hi Arie.

We operate a wine bar, all sales are in person, nothing online.  We have a wine club, and our members get special pricing and benefits in exchange for purchasing 2 bottles each month.   The Loyalty program offered by square doesn't fit our needs because we aren't using points. 

We need to capture the customer name each time they come in so that we can manually confirm (we have a list) that they are members and get special pricing.  And we need to be able to make sure they buy their two bottles each month, again we look at our list.  We remember to get the name 90% of the time, but sometimes we forget.  We need a way to require us to "edit customer" each time we make a sale.

We use the free version of the restaurant software because all the kitchen features are not relevant.  Does that help?

[Arie]

Thank you for providing these details, @winespotwa! 

There's an option in the standard point of sale app under More > Settings > Checkout > Customer Management, where you can enable Collect customer information before checkout. While this doesn't force you to add a customer to each sale, it brings up the "Add a customer" option before you complete the sale. This is what this looks like: 

Right now making customer details compulsory upon checkout would be a feature request, which you can submit here. 

[winespotwa]

We currently collect customer names, but I don't see the options that you are describing. Maybe there is another place to set this?  Are you in the Restaurant system?  If I go to More, there is no settings or check out option.  Can you screen shot me something that helps me to get to what you are describing?  And if it's allowing/asking the customer to enter their own info, that's not helpful.  Do you know anything about developing separate Aps to integrate with Square and potentially help us with the huge amount of work required to manage our wine club? Thanks.

[JJ_]

Hello there!

This sounds like a good question for our Restaurants team, @winespotwa

They can take a look at your account with you to help shine a light here, and identify the best way to meet your business needs whether that is by tweaking your settings or using an integration. Please reach out by phone or email when you have a moment by logging into your Square account and heading here.

[winespotwa]

My experience to date is that the support team has no idea where to send me.  As you can tell, I'm pretty frustrated trying to solve a problem that feels like it should be easy:
Require customer name to be entered at the time of sale. 

We have the ability to enter the name, and we have an "edit customer button" so it's easy to do, but we just need it to be required rather than optional. 

Is there any chance that Square will build in this option at some point?  If not I need to pursue some sort of custom (read $$) integration and/or make sure that Square is really the best solution for my business.  If you know of a support person who is really good and I can talk directly to them, I would try one more time, but I have already called square and been sent around to people who say they have no solution for me.

[PartyManiaMD]

You might want to take another look at the loyalty program depending on a few things. I assume the loyalty program is free as long as they buy two bottles of wine?

You could set it to earn 1 point (or however many discounts they're entitled to) per bottle sold (you can set it by points by category) and that would let you only give rewards for bottles sold. 

In this case they'd earn "points" per bottle sold and then they would be able to use them on discounts for rewards that match your special pricing.

It might simplify it because you wouldn't have to manually adjust the price or track their purchases.

[winespotwa]

Thank you but we looked into that carefully and determined that it would not work for us.

[winespotwa]

Let me clarify.  We would still have to remember to enter the customer name, so we know who gets the points, as we can't set it to be required.  And not all purchases would earn points, just the members.  Everything I read made it more complicated without solving the main challenge.  Perhaps you have more insight into this?