The Square Register app revolutionized the fashion merchants and restaurants consummate the payment process. With the app and accompanying Square Reader, typical consumer smartphones and tablets are transformed into fully functional POS systems.

This mobility enables users to complete transactions from anywhere: at their shop, in their food truck or at a showcase or market.

But is that all Square has to offer? Read on for our comprehensive report and watch the video below to get up to speed in under iii minutes:

To detect out if the Square Register app can really compete with the many affordable iPad POS systems on the marketplace today, we analyzed the business value of each Square product.

Click below to jump to a specific Square offering:

Square Register App and Bill of fare Reader

Foursquare Dashboard

Square Customer Direction

Square Employee Management and Payroll

Square Appointments

Square Reader and Square Register App

Square's namesake production is its easy-to-use Reader and accompanying Annals app. While Square still offers their traditional gratuitous magstripe reader, the new Foursquare Reader enables both NFC and EMV payment options (and information technology comes with the magstripe reader.)

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Square's payment screen and new NFC and EMV bill of fare Reader
 

All you need to do is prepare up an account for your business with Square. You tin then order the new Foursquare Reader and start accepting transactions.

Rather than pay a monthly subscription fee, you pay a 2.75 percent transaction fee for each transaction. The transaction fee can be a deterrent for higher-revenue businesses—however, information technology's a reasonable mode to pay for smaller businesses adopting their starting time POS organization.

As information technology turns out, an analysis of the many costless consultations we have with software buyers every day reveals a shocking statistic: 64 percent of single-shop retailers and 63 percent of single-location restaurants don't even have a POS system in place.

The affordability of the Foursquare Annals and Reader make it a neat option for these start-time buyers.

 
 

The mobility enabled past these systems can be hugely impactful, specially for restaurants. Square checks all of the boxes in our mPOS Checklist. At present, allow'due south take a closer look at some of the things it can practise.

Square Dashboard

Due to the success of the Register app and Reader, Square has built additional capabilities to support them. The first of these tools we'll highlight is the Square Dashboard: a reporting and analytics awarding that offers business owners valuable insight and transparency into their sales.

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Foursquare Dashboard being accessed via laptop
 

Square Dashboard is included with your Square account. It articulates vast quantities of data about your business organisation into customizable, user-friendly and easily digestible charts and graphs. These information points can show you lot how your store is performing, from mean solar day over solar day to yr over year.

The Dashboard also allows you lot to manage and compare sales for multiple locations.

We know from our enquiry that your peers in the retail and restaurant space put a lot of value on these types of capabilities. Over two-thirds (76 percent) of single-shop retailers we speak with want sales reporting and analytics in their new POS.

 

In that location's tremendous value in the transparency analytics tools offering. What'due south more, our research shows 61 percent of retailers use them to manage pricing strategies, which are crucial to the success of any business concern.

 

In all, the Square Dashboard is your back-part mothership. It helps you larn more about your business organisation and abound that bottom line.

Square Customer Management

Square Dashboard provides later on-the-fact insights and deportment. But Square Client Management gives you the necessary tools to proactively appoint current, past and potential customers.

These capabilities include:

  • Directory management
  • Insights
  • Targeted marketing
  • Client feedback channels
 
Information found on a Square customer profile, provided by Square
 

The directory feature enables you to rails customer purchases—by either inbound the customer's contact information at the register during checkout, or by recording it automatically from their card swipe.

You can use this data to help place valuable customers who tend to spend more average at your business.

 
An example of a breakup of insights available with Square Customer Direction, provided by Square
 

With detailed customer profiles in place, Square Customer Management can provide high-level insights into your operations.

Fundamental points, such as the percentage of new versus returning customers patronizing your business organization, can help you monitor brand loyalty and your power to generate new customers.

 
Square allows you to differentiate and target various types of customers, provided by Square
 

One time you lot have a detailed breakdown of your customers, you can use Square's marketing capabilities to ship targeted emails to different segments.

For instance, you can send lapsed customers a coupon encouraging them to come up back to the store. Square'southward marketing tools even provide insight into how many customers are viewing and redeeming the coupons and offers in your emails.

 
Example of a conversation with a customer via Square's feedback functionality, provided by Foursquare
 

The terminal core capability of Square Client Direction is the ability to get firsthand feedback from customers: They can send comments on their experience directly to your business from their digital receipts.

You can then engage with these customers and provide offers to make up for poor experiences—or but advantage them for the feedback.

With these tools in hand, Foursquare Customer Management enables yous to build customer loyalty and generate repeat concern.

Software Communication research on restaurant loyalty programs for millennials showcases the importance of successfully building a customer following, and applies equally to retail businesses.

Square includes basic customer management capabilities with your business relationship. You can upgrade to go all the functionality listed here for an additional monthly cost.

Square Employee Management and Payroll

Forth with all of these customer-oriented tools, Square offers employee direction and payroll capabilities.

The Employee Management awarding helps you manage your workforce through timekeeping, performance tracking and automatic tip and commission payout. Information technology'south priced on a monthly subscription based on the number of employees.

The Payroll component helps automate tedious payment processes; it has a monthly subscription price, plus an boosted cost for each employee being paid that month.

Central capabilities of Square Employee Management include:

    • A clock-in and -out characteristic that automatically manages employees hours for payroll.
    • Employee passcodes that identify which employee is responsible for each transaction, in society to rails functioning and pay commissions and tips.
    • The power to assign different levels of access to employees, depending on their needs and task level (east.chiliad., you might only give your manager the ability to give refunds or comp orders).

As for Square Payroll, it can:

    • Sync automatically with employee time cards, so you don't have to consign or movement any data into or out of the arrangement.
    • Automatically factor in overtime to employee paychecks.
    • Automatically manage tax withholdings, payments and filings for businesses in participating states.

Square Appointments

Formal engagement management tools are less common in POS systems, and Square Appointments is peculiarly noteworthy for its shift-scheduling capabilities.

Our report on schedule optimization for hourly employees constitute that businesses without scheduling software fall short in this section. Threescore-four percent of shift workers at companies without software learn their schedule less than two weeks before it starts.

In other words: Without scheduling software in place, nearly ii-thirds of hourly employees can't plan more than than two weeks in advance because they don't know when they're working.

Given this, you can see the importance of Square Appointment'south shift scheduling tools. These allow your staff to log in online and view their hours, upcoming shifts and any scheduled vacation days, so they're always in the loop.

Along with shift scheduling, Square Appointments enables engagement-based businesses such as salons, spas and golf game courses to accept customer bookings 24/seven. Customers simply become to a concern' website and reserve their ain times on with Foursquare's embedded agenda widget.

Alternatively, you lot can embed a booking and reservation push in your email communications. Yous receive notifications for each booking, and tin can conform times and confirm appointments.

Square Date is priced per calendar month, based on the number of user calendars needed.

Adjacent Steps

With all these capabilities, Square tin satisfy the needs of almost small retail concern or restaurant owners. Notwithstanding, we believe it's worth exploring additional POS options to larn if whatever other systems are a better fit for you. Whether or non y'all are sold on Square, consider these next steps:

  • Speak to one of our Software Advice POS experts at (855) 998-8505. At no cost to you, our retail advisors can help you whittle down your list to just those systems that truly meet your individual business organisation needs.
  • Have our online retail questionnaire. The POS software market can be intimidating, especially if you are a first-fourth dimension buyer. These questions help us narrow downward the best POS systems for you.
  • Read software reviews from your peers. After we get yous a short list of applicable systems, spend some time reading reviews left by your retail and restaurant peers. Reviews give you valuable insights into these systems, which product descriptions merely tin can't provide.