Recurring Issue with Categories Disappearing in Square POS - Seeking Advice and Solutions

[Kidd]

Hello fellow Square users,

I'm reaching out to the community for insights or potential solutions regarding an ongoing issue we're facing with our Square POS system. I am the IT Director at a hospitality company, and we've been experiencing a recurring problem where our categories suddenly disappear. This issue first arose last week, and despite reaching out to Square support and having the matter escalated to their engineering team, we're yet to receive a substantial update.

We manually re-added all the categories, connected items, and printers, which was a considerable task due to the extensive number of items and locations we manage. Unfortunately, the issue has reoccurred today, and we received the same response about the engineering team working on it.

Has anyone else experienced this issue? If so, have you figured out what's causing it or found a workaround? Here's a summary of our situation:

• Issue Description: Categories in Square POS system disappear without any clear trigger.
• Impact: Significant operational disruption due to the large scale of items and multiple locations. 
• Current Status: After the initial occurrence, categories were manually re-added, but the issue has happened again.
• Response from Square: The issue has been escalated to the engineering team, but there has been no resolution or substantial update yet.

I would greatly appreciate any advice, shared experiences, or insights from this community. If you've encountered this problem and found a solution or even a temporary workaround, it would be immensely helpful to hear from you. Additionally, any tips on how to expediently escalate this with Square or improve our communication with them would also be valuable.

[AppaloosaTech]

Hi @Kidd , that sounds really awful, I'm sorry this is happening. 

Something that might help if this occurs again is to have a spreadsheet backup of your item library. This would allow you to simply upload that spreadsheet if your categories get deleted and it would connect the items to the categories again. This way all you would need to do manually is setup the categories with the printers at your locations. 

Not a full solution, but a little help in recovering from it each time. 

I do have a question: Does it also delete your items, or it's exclusively the categories?

Feel free to connect with me via email or phone if you'd like, I'm a Square Partner and very familiar with the system. 

[Kidd]

We have started implementing daily backups of our catalog as a precautionary measure, hoping it will mitigate the impact if this issue arises again. I'm looking for a method to automate this process in the future, as manual backups can be quite cumbersome. However, there's still a concern because it occasionally fails when we attempt to make bulk changes to items using the upload feature.

This issue seems to exclusively affect the categories, not the items themselves.

[AppaloosaTech]

It's possible to automate this via the Square API, but that wouldn't work for you because the catalog objects the Square API provides identify the category by ID, not by name. So if your categories get deleted and recreated, they won't have the same IDs. 

With the bulk import/export, you may not need to do this daily. I would venture to guess that you're doing this daily to also backup the inventory, but if you just remove all the inventory quantities from the items in the spreadsheet (make blank cells) it shouldn't touch the inventory data. Make sure to test this for yourself, but I just tested it and it worked for me. 

I'm thinking this issue either won't happen again or will stop in the near future because Square has recently added category hierarchy to the POS side, and they will soon be connecting the POS categories to the Online categories. So my thoughts are that the issue is happening due to system changes preparing for and implementing those new features. 

I've also brought this to the attention of the partner support people.