Add up similar items on receipt?

[ParapluDH]

Using Open Tickets enables me to place separate orders. Useful for a restaurant. The app remembers all those separate orders. First round, second round, food order, etc. When I print the bill/receipt all the rounds appear separately on the receipt, leaving the costumer with a dazzling receipt. Would it be possible to have Square adding up similar SKU's (regardless of modifiers). This would leave a cleaner bill/receipt.

[AshleyK]

Hey! Thanks for reaching out and welcome to the Community! At this time, we do not have a way to organize open tickets or receipts by items or SKUs, but you can always filter your sales by items to see which items are selling more and print the receipts from there.

So I can be sure to send the best recommendation to our Product Team, can you give me a more detailed example of what you are looking for and why this would be beneficial for your business?

[ParapluDH]

Thanks for your quick reply!

For instance: you come in to my restaurant en order a coke and a beer. I open a ticket and order your two drinks and hit save. The order is saved to your ticket and the order ticket is printed at the bar. Half an hour later you order a beer and a coke for second round, etc... When I print the bill through the ticket menu I get a bill with four separate drinks, 1 coke, 1 beer, 1 coke, 1 beer. Preferably that should be 2 coke and 2 beer. Regardless of modifiers (turned off for printing on costumer receipts) same items share the same SKU. It would be sensible for the app to perform a check on the SKU's on the ticket and add them up before printing. Saves paper and leaves a cleaner, more comprehensive receipt. 

In all honesty, this might be an option in the app already, but I didn't find it yet.

Many thanks!

[AshleyK]

Ok! So I've done some testing on my demo account and I believe we have what you are looking for already in place, but the way it's printing for you would matter depending on your printer set up. 

The items will only print on separate bills/line items if you have them printing as "open ticket stubs" for the kitchen, however, when I close the sale and print the final receipt, I see my line items printing as Beer x 2 and Coke x 2 even if I have sign and tip turned on.

Would you be willing to explain the printer settings you have turned on for your printer (You will see this under Settings > Printers > Select the printer station)?

[ParapluDH]

I have two printers set up, one for the bar and one for the kitchen.

Bar is set up to print receipts and order tickets, stubs is toggled off.

Kitchen is set up to print order tickets, receipts and stubs are toggled off.

Both the printed and the electronic receipt do not show same items added up.

As you can see on the screenshot below. First round are four drinks. Second round is the food order en four of the same drinks. Instead of adding the items up they are just printed as ordered.

You may notice that we sell menu's at a fixed price. I've set the options for starter, main and dessert as items at a zero charge. These options do not need to be printed. Is there a way to turn printing of items at zero charge off on receipts?

Workaround would be to list the options in a modifierset and turn printing for this modifierset off. But this would give me an order ticket in the kitchen that says starter/main/dessert, starter/main/dessert rather than 2 starters/2 main/2 dessert, which is much easier to read during preparations.

Many thanks for your effort!!

[ParapluDH]

I'm sorry, two of the same items in separate rounds:

Brand Pils 0,25 tap

Affligem Blond tap

[AshleyK]

Thanks for sending in that screenshot.. it is immensely helpful! I have a strong intuition that this is a bug our engineering team will need to take a look at because that is not behaving normally - all items with the same SKU and variation sets should be grouped together as you see with the Panna Cotta (which is one of my all time favorite desserts, by the way!).

Also, is this only happening with the same items (Affligem Blond Tap and Brand Pils tap 0,25) or is it randomly occurring?

Before I work with engineering on this, we need to make sure we cross off all the troubleshooting steps we can try:

• Make sure that both your mobile device and Square app are up-to-date.
• Log out of the app and sign back in. If you’re operating in Offline Mode and have pending offline payments, you won’t be able to sign out of the app. This is to prevent your pending payments from being lost.
• Turn your mobile device off and then back on.
• Force quit the app on your device.
• Be sure to enable the permissions requested when you open the Square app. This access allows the Square app to communicate with your device to complete payments.
• If you don’t have any pending offline payments, delete and reinstall the app. See Apple’s support site and Google’s support site for instructions on how to do so.

Remember, if your device is in Offline Mode, don’t delete and reinstall the Square Point of Sale app. Pending offline payments will be permanently lost and the funds will not be captured if the app is deleted.

Deleting and reinstalling the app will not impact your Square account or completed payments because your data is stored on our servers. If there aren’t any pending offline payments on your account, you can delete the app, reinstall it, and log back into your account with your email address and password.

[ParapluDH]

Will do/try all that and follow up.

Note that the fingerlicking Panna Cotta's were ordered in one save, not in two separate saves.

As long as you don't hit save items with no modifiers or variations will add up.

[ParapluDH]

OK, checked everything an re-installed the app. Still items are not adding up on the receipt. As long as you're processing an order items will add up, unless you have same items with different modifiers. As soon as you save the order it is treated as one separate order, which will be printed in whole on the receipt/bill.

When you place a second (and third, fourth, etc.) they will all be saved as separate orders, regardless of items being the same. (This feature comes in handy when you want to repeat an order (round of drinks). I've put this particular idea in another thread.)

I've set all of my modifiers to 'not print on costumer receipt'. 

It has to be possible to make the app add up SKU's on the 'print bill'/charge->receipt command.

Crossing my fingers!

[AshleyK]

Thank you so very much for trying that! If the items are being added, without different modifiers, and showing as separate charges, that is definitely not behaving as normal. I have filed a ticket with engineering and hope to hear back from them soon, though with it being a holiday, we may have a slight delay in a response. 

I really appreciate all the work you've put into giving us this information and trying to troubleshoot!

[AshleyK]

@ParapluDH I want to thank you immensely for your patience while we continued to dig for answers with our engineering team. Between the holidays and investigations, the answer for this seemed to be harder to find than initially noted. Since this is a longer post, I will bold the most important information for you! 🙂

Regardless, we have found an explanation to your grouping issues - items will group together if added to the ticket without the waiter's leaving the screen, but if they sign out and back in, or walk away from the screen for a while (in the event of adding a second round), then the items will start a new line item.

This allows the app to help resolve conflicts if multiple POS devices are acting on the same ticket at once. This is what results in the ticket showing up as a list of several separate items (even if they're the same thing "hot dog") instead of just one item with summed quantities per unique item ("hot dog x 4").

The behavior you were likely seeing when it seemed to group all the itemizations into one vs the times that it didn't is likely related to whether you saved the ticket and moved away from the screen or not. All of the information that you'll see for those tickets has just been pulled from the server and is immutable, so if you then try to start adding new items they shouldn't group together (with the original items) and instead should create separate new items.

However, within this new set of items you will have the ability to have grouping, but once you save the ticket and migrate away from the screen then new additions to the ticket after that should not be grouped with the pre-existing ticket items.

[ParapluDH]

Dear Ashley,

Thanks for your reply. 

I am aware of this behavior and now I also understand why.

As mentioned it could also be very useful for repeating individual order tickets. E.g. when you have like four people at the bar ordering the same round of drinks repeatedly. 

My actual question was if it's possible to add a command/script to the 'print bill' as well as to the 'print/send receipt' button that summarizes identical SKU's. In my (slightly technical) opinion gathering and summarizing data from a database doesn't alter the behavior.  

First look up identical SKU's: no modifiers and/or variations, simply add up.

Second: In case of identical SKU, add up identical variations.

Third: (check if modifiers are set to print on receipt), identical SKU, identical variation, add up identical modifiers.

Hope this clarifies what I'm actually looking for. Love the app and happy to think along. Many thanks for your efforts as well.

Greetings!

[AshleyK]

Hey! Thanks for clarifying and I'm sorry for misunderstanding. I should have added that at this time, that is still a feature request we are working on, but is not available now, but hopefully the reasons above does help explain a bit of the logic behind the design. 

[ParapluDH]

Sure does. I'll patiently await da feature..

Many thanks!!