Square for Restaurants

Provides a graphical floor-plan editor where an operator can draw sections, place tables of varying shape/capacity, save multiple floor-plan layouts per location, and assign sections to servers.

order-capture-floor-plan-editor

Graphical floor plan with sections (Dining Room, Bar, Patio) and placed tables; cover counts tie to seats. Multi-layout-per-location not confirmed. https://squareup.com/help/us/en/article/6427-building-your-floor-plan · retrieved 2026-08-01

Order lines can be tagged to a seat number at entry, and the check can be split by seat afterward without re-keying items.

order-capture-seat-level

Track seating assigns items to individual seats; items assigned to seats auto-split when the check is split. https://squareup.com/help/us/en/article/8583-manage-seats-in-your-restaurant · retrieved 2026-08-01

Items can be assigned to courses and held, with a fire-next-course action available from a handheld or terminal that releases only that course to the kitchen.

order-capture-coursing-hold-fire

Group items into courses, hold, then fire; firing prints to station printers and/or displays on KDS. https://squareup.com/help/us/en/article/7748-coursing-with-square-kds · retrieved 2026-08-01

Supports splitting a check by item, by seat, by even N-way, and by arbitrary dollar/percentage amount, and merging checks or tables back together, including after partial payment.

order-capture-split-merge

Article 8165 documents split by item ('select items and move them to a new check so guests can pay by item separately'), split by seat ('any items assigned to a single seat will each move to their own check and items assigned to multiple seats will be evenly split among them'), even N-way ('Tap Split evenly > choose the number of ways you want to split'), and arbitrary amounts twice over - 'Select Split evenly and in how many ways or Customize split. Choose the amount(s) to split by' at item level, and 'When you split a payment, you can only split by amounts' at check level. Merging is in article 8166: 'Select the check you want to merge > Move,' plus drag-to-merge on the floor plan ('If the target table is occupied, you'll be prompted to confirm a merge'). Shortfalls: splitting or merging AFTER a partial payment is not described anywhere in either article; fractional item splitting requires the Plus/Premium 'New order and pay capabilities'; and 8165 enumerates what cannot be split - 'Sell by unit/fractional quantity items' and 'Items that are portions of a previously split item'. https://squareup.com/help/us/en/article/8165-split-a-payment-and-check-with-square-for-restaurants · retrieved 2026-08-09

Opens a bar tab against a card pre-authorization with a configurable auth amount, supports incremental re-auth as the tab grows, and auto-closes stale tabs at end of day. differentiator

order-capture-bar-tab-preauth

Configurable auth amount IS documented, contrary to the earlier note: 'Enable and configure a minimum preauthorization amount for each of your applicable locations. Preauthorization minimums can range from $1.01 to $250,' and at capture 'Square will authorize the minimum preauthorization amount configured in your Square Dashboard or POS device settings, or the value of items in the cart at the time of preauthorization, whichever is greater.' Shortfalls: the authorization is taken once at tab open - there is no incremental re-authorization as the tab grows; the article's only management actions are 'Preauthorize a different card' and 'Remove a preauthorization'; and no end-of-day stale-tab auto-close is described, only that 'Preauthorizations typically last around 36 hours, but may vary depending on the customer's card network and issuing bank.' https://squareup.com/help/us/en/article/8455-enable-and-configure-preauthorization-for-bar-tabs · retrieved 2026-08-09

An open check can be transferred between servers, tables, and devices, and the transfer is recorded in an audit log naming both employees.

order-capture-transfer-audit

Reassign is a first-class check action: 'Check reassignments can happen when one team member ends their shift, leaves in the middle of service, and needs to pass the check to another clocked-in team member,' performed via Actions > Assign > select a team member. Checks also move between tables and merge by drag on the floor plan, and the article states a permission gate: 'If you're moving a check that belongs to another team member, you'll need to enter a passcode or have the appropriate permission.' A team member activity log exists under Advanced Access. Shortfall: no documentation that the transfer itself writes an audit entry naming both the outgoing and incoming employee - the Advanced Access page describes the Activity Log only as 'actions taken by individual team members... such as refunds, discounts, and voided transactions', and does not list transfers. https://squareup.com/help/us/en/article/8166-comp-void-and-reassign-checks-with-square-for-restaurants · retrieved 2026-08-09

Ships a first-party handheld ordering app running natively on the handheld device (not a remote/mirrored desktop session) that can send to kitchen and take a card payment tableside.

order-capture-native-handheld

Square Handheld, $399, first-party 6.2in Android-class device with integrated EMV/NFC reader; sends orders and takes payment tableside. https://squareup.com/us/en/hardware/handheld/specs · retrieved 2026-08-01

With the internet down, terminals and handhelds can still create orders, apply modifiers, send to kitchen, and tender cash, and the vendor publishes what does and does not work offline.

order-capture-offline-order-entry

Offline mode is documented in detail with an explicit unavailable-features list, but the docs are payment-centric; offline kitchen routing/KDS behavior is not stated. https://squareup.com/help/us/en/article/7777-process-card-payments-with-offline-mode · retrieved 2026-08-01

Guest QR at-table ordering writes items onto the same open check as server-entered items, rather than creating a separate order ticket. differentiator

order-capture-qr-same-check

QR at-table ordering is a Square Online channel, not a write onto the server's open check. The customer scans, 'open your website ordering page, then select items, add special requests, and pay-all from from their mobile device', and Square adds 'Since everything is processed online, there's no need to handle credit cards or cash.' The paid order then 'will appear on your point of sale, and feed directly to your kitchen ticket printer or kitchen display system (KDS)', routed by the ordering station the QR code is tied to. The Order Manager article is explicit that these land apart from open checks: the Self-serve view holds 'all orders created through QR code ordering if enabled, grouped by the specific station name where the order originated', and 'Station names may not map to the same check name or table name assigned to an open check.' So a guest QR item creates a separate prepaid ticket keyed to a station, not a line on the server-entered check. Square Online Plus/Premium. https://squareup.com/help/us/en/article/8153-set-up-qr-code-ordering-with-square-for-restaurants · retrieved 2026-09-10

Offers a first-party self-order kiosk that renders the same menu and modifier tree as the POS with no separate menu build, and the vendor documents ADA/accessibility conformance for it. differentiator

order-capture-kiosk-first-party

Square Kiosk app ($50/mo/device Plus, $30 Premium) runs the same Square catalog. No ADA/WCAG conformance documentation found. https://squareup.com/us/en/point-of-sale/restaurants/pricing · retrieved 2026-08-01

Supports drive-thru-specific order flow: order-point/pay-window/pickup-window separation, order sequencing or tandem-lane assignment, and pull-forward or parking-spot assignment.

order-capture-drive-thru

Re-cited, and the previous rationale is withdrawn as false: Square does document a drive-thru flow. Drive-Thru mode 'optimizes your Square Point of Sale for drive-thru operations. When enabled, it automatically activates the Drive-Thru fulfillment method, captures vehicle information (color and type) for each order, and provides a dedicated Drive-Thru tab in Order Manager for streamlined order tracking.' The verdict survives on the claim's own terms because that article enumerates the whole feature and none of the three things asked for is in it. There is no order-point/pay-window/pickup-window separation - one device runs the mode, and 'Drive-Thru mode is available on Square Register, iPad, and Square Terminal devices.' There is no lane sequencing or tandem-lane assignment; the only identifier is a free-text vehicle description, and where it is skipped 'the order may show as "Unknown vehicle" on internal views.' There is no pull-forward or parking-spot assignment. Square for Restaurants Premium. https://squareup.com/help/us/en/article/8647-set-up-drive-thru-mode-and-fulfillment · retrieved 2026-09-10

Captures and reports drive-thru speed-of-service timers by segment (order, total, window) tied to individual orders.

order-capture-drive-thru-timers

Square release notes: 'Drive-Thru is a dedicated POS configuration for Square for Restaurants that supports the full drive-thru lane flow' with 'Speed-of-service reporting to track service time, throughput, and exceptions by channel, location, and daypart'. Shortfall: the setup article squareup.com/help/us/en/article/8647 enumerates Drive-Thru mode's captured data (vehicle color and type, Drive-Thru fulfillment method, dedicated Drive-Thru tab in Order Manager) and describes no segment timers; the product page squareup.com/us/en/restaurants/drive-thru claims only 'order entry and service time data'. Segmented order / total / window timers tied to individual orders are not documented, and the reporting evidence is a vendor release note, not documentation. https://squareup.com/us/en/release-notes/release-notes-may-21st · retrieved 2026-08-06

Vendor ships a first-party AI voice ordering agent for phone and/or drive-thru that injects orders directly as POS orders, or publishes a documented API partner program for third-party voice AI. differentiator

order-capture-voice-ai

No first-party voice agent found. Square does satisfy the alternative limb: a fully public, self-serve Orders API plus an open App Marketplace a voice vendor can build against. https://developer.squareup.com/docs/orders-api/what-it-does · retrieved 2026-08-01

Supports order throttling: per-channel capacity limits per time slot with automatic quote-time extension when kitchen load exceeds a configured threshold. differentiator

order-capture-throttling

The online-ordering profile settings enumerate a per-slot capacity control -- order limits per 15-minute window, order-scheduling advance days, cut-off times and 'Scheduled downtime' date ranges -- set independently for the in-house-courier and on-demand delivery channels, so capacity can be capped per channel per time slot. Shortfall: the cap is a fixed configured number; nothing in the settings ties it to kitchen load, and no automatic quote-time extension when a load threshold is exceeded is documented (the only quote control is a static prep time plus an 'automatic vs manual delivery time calculation' toggle). https://squareup.com/help/us/en/article/8609-set-up-delivery-options-for-your-online-ordering-profile · retrieved 2026-08-06

Accepts future-dated/scheduled orders with a per-channel lead time and automatically injects them into the make queue at a computed fire time rather than on receipt.

order-capture-scheduled-orders

Square Online ordering profiles support scheduled pickup/delivery with prep timing. Computed fire-time injection into a make queue is not documented. https://squareup.com/help/us/en/article/8609-set-up-delivery-options-for-your-online-ordering-profile · retrieved 2026-08-01

Provides a distinct catering order flow with quotes, deposits, balance-due tracking, and a delivery/event schedule separate from the standard order queue.

order-capture-catering

A catering POS mode was announced in the May 13 2025 F&B platform release. Quotes, deposits, balance-due tracking and an event schedule are not documented. https://squareup.com/us/en/press/releases-food-and-beverage · retrieved 2026-08-01

Pushes an order-ready signal back to third-party marketplaces (e.g. DoorDash) from POS or KDS state, rather than requiring a tablet tap. differentiator

order-capture-order-ready-signal

DoorDash publishes a machine-readable registry of its integration partners at https://merchants.doordash.com/api/partner-integrations — 64 providers, each tiered PREFERRED (12), CERTIFIED (47) or AT_RISK_OF_SUSPENSION (5), and each carrying an explicit true/false flag for 23 named integration features across four collections. It is served anonymously and merchants.doordash.com/robots.txt permits it. The programme is described, and its eight high-quality features defined in prose, at https://merchants.doordash.com/en-us/learning-center/doordash-preferred-integrations-program; the merchant-facing label for each flag comes from the label dictionary embedded in DoorDash's integrations comparison page. SCOPE: this attests the vendor's DOORDASH integration specifically — not Uber Eats, not Grubhub, and not the POS in general. DIRECTION: a true flag is a positive attestation; a false flag is NOT a reliable negative on its own, because Lavu's help centre documents a DoorDash temporary-closure control with scheduled auto-reopen while Lavu's `STORE_AVAILABILITY_WEBHOOKS` flag reads false, and Xenial's developer docs enumerate an order-ready notification while its `SUPPORT_ORDER_READY_SIGNAL` flag reads false. The flag `SUPPORT_ORDER_READY_SIGNAL` is TRUE for `square_v2_production`, which carries 8 of 8 high-quality features. DoorDash labels the flag 'Order ready signal' and defines it on the programme page as 'Order ready signal - Notifies Dashers when an order is ready for pickup to improve timing and coordination.' This replaces an inference the registry falsifies as a general rule: the cell previously reasoned from Preferred membership to the feature, and membership does NOT imply all eight — of the 12 PREFERRED providers 10 carry featuresCompleted=8 but `qubeyond_v2` carries 7 and `checkmate` 6. Square's conclusion survives because Square is one of the ten, but it now stands on the per-feature flag itself. `partial` and not `yes` because the claim reads on third-party marketplaces generally and names DoorDash only as an example, while DoorDash is the single channel this instrument can speak to; and because the claim specifies the signal fire from POS or KDS state rather than a tablet tap, which no flag identifies. https://merchants.doordash.com/api/partner-integrations · retrieved 2026-09-12

Voids, comps, and discounts require a reason code and can be gated behind role-based manager approval, with all instances recorded in an exception report.

order-capture-void-comp-controls

Reason codes ARE documented, contrary to the earlier note. Every one of the four comp/void flows ends the same way: 'Select a reason for comp and tap Comp' and 'Select a reason for void and tap Void', for an item and for the whole check. The actions are permission-gated ('team members with... the checkout permission to take payments. Set permissions in Square Dashboard') and moving another team member's check needs 'a passcode or... the appropriate permission'. Discounts are gated separately by a 'Require a passcode' toggle in advanced discount settings (article 3955). Shortfalls: no dedicated exception report - comps appear in sales and inventory reporting and voids/discounts in the Advanced Access Activity Log, but nothing joins them into one report; and the reason list itself is not documented as configurable, nor is manager approval documented as a distinct approval step rather than a permission the acting user holds. https://squareup.com/help/us/en/article/8166-comp-void-and-reassign-checks-with-square-for-restaurants · retrieved 2026-08-09

Supports modifier groups nested at least three levels deep, each level with independent min/max selection counts and a forced-selection (required) flag.

menu-pricing-nested-modifiers

Researcher inferred absence from the Catalog API data model and missed a shipped feature. Square's own release notes (Vol 8, v7.16, July 16 2026) state: 'Modifier sets can be nested under a specific modifier choice, up to three levels deep,' with conditional display (selecting a modifier reveals the follow-up set). Caveat that keeps this short of unqualified: it is gated on the 'Live Check experience' being enabled on Square Point of Sale, and support is enumerated per surface (F&B modes on iOS, Register, Terminal, Ordering Profiles; third-party display varies). Score yes with a rollout-gating https://squareup.com/us/en/release-notes/release-notes-july-16th · retrieved 2026-08-01 adversarially verified

A single modifier can carry different prices depending on the parent item and the selected size, configured as a matrix rather than by duplicating the modifier.

menu-pricing-modifier-price-by-parent-size

Per-item modifier price overrides exist in the catalog model; a price matrix keyed on both parent item and selected size is not documented. https://developer.squareup.com/docs/catalog-api/what-it-does · retrieved 2026-08-01

Supports fractional/sectioned modifier placement (at minimum halves, ideally quarters) with independent pricing per section. differentiator

menu-pricing-fractional-placement

Attacked directly and found nothing. Square's modifier documentation and its community both still route half-and-half through duplicated 'Side A' / 'Side B' modifier sets with independent pricing — a user-authored workaround, not a portions/fractional-placement feature. Even after the July 2026 nested-modifier release, no fractional placement, no per-fraction price rule, and no sectioned make-line rendering exists. The dependent 'no' scores (half-and-half rule, kitchen-pizza-fractional-display) stand. https://squareup.com/help/us/en/article/5119-create-and-manage-item-modifiers · retrieved 2026-08-01 adversarially verified

The half-and-half pricing rule is operator-configurable among at least two of: charge the higher-priced half, average the halves, or charge each topping at a fraction of full price. differentiator

menu-pricing-half-and-half-rule

Upheld, and the premise now rests on the data model rather than on an inference from a sibling cell. Square publishes its whole contract as an OpenAPI document, and its 1,478 schemas and 1,294 distinct property names contain no `half`, `fraction`, `portion` or `section` property anywhere -- the closest constructs are CatalogModifier with a single price_money, CatalogItemVariation, and the Orders API line-item modifier with an integer quantity. The spec bounds nothing on its own: `additionalProperties` is set to false in 0 of its 1,478 schemas, so it is a floor, not a ceiling. So the absence is confirmed against the documentation corpus as well: across a 1,693-document corpus read 2026-09-09 (482 developer pages from the vendor own llms-full.txt, which declares its own count of 482 and matched on the split; 1,210 squareup.com pages covering the 830-article Support Center and the product, hardware, release-note and Square University sections; and the 255-path, 1,478-schema OpenAPI specification rendered as a searchable artefact of paths, schema names, property names, enums and descriptions -- 15.9M characters), `half and half`, `half-and-half`, `left half`, `right half`, `half topping`, `split topping`, `topping placement` and `sectioned` occur zero times, tokenised and as bare substrings alike. The one trap is the word fractional, which reads 17 times in 12 documents and never once means placement: every occurrence is a fractional QUANTITY of a weighed or measured item, as the Orders API puts it -- 'If you call `CreateOrder` or `CalculateOrder` with items sold by fractional units, Square calculates the line item total as the base price multiplied by the quantity as a decimal.' A pricing rule for halves cannot be operator-configurable when halves are not representable, and Square own pizzeria page describes the ceiling of its menu tooling as modifier groups with 'quantity controls, required selections' rather than fractional placement. https://raw.githubusercontent.com/square/connect-api-specification/master/api.json · retrieved 2026-09-09

Supports modifier quantity tiers (light / regular / extra / double) with a configurable price multiplier per tier, distinct from adding the modifier twice.

menu-pricing-topping-quantity-tiers

CatalogModifierList exposes allow_quantities ('When true, allows multiple quantities of the same modifier') and is_conversational, plus min_selected_modifiers / max_selected_modifiers; the help article squareup.com/help/us/en/article/5119 matches, with 'Allow multiple quantities of a single modifier' and 'Use Conversational Modifiers on POS to show operator buttons like Add, No, or Extra on Square Restaurant POS app'. Shortfall: the schema has no per-tier price-multiplier field -- quantity pricing is simply the modifier price times the count, i.e. exactly 'adding the modifier twice', which is what the claim asks to be distinct from. Conversational modifiers give the light/extra vocabulary but carry no separate price, and 5119 states 'Conversational modifiers cannot be used if Allow multiple quantities of a single modifier is toggled on', so the two halves cannot be combined. https://developer.squareup.com/reference/square/objects/CatalogModifierList · retrieved 2026-08-06

Item base price can be defined as a grid across two variant axes (e.g. size x crust/preparation) with a per-cell price override. differentiator

menu-pricing-size-style-matrix

ITEM_OPTION objects define variant axes; the cross product materializes as item variations (up to 250 per item), each carrying its own price. https://developer.squareup.com/docs/catalog-api/what-it-does · retrieved 2026-08-01

Items can define an included-modifier allowance (e.g. three toppings included) that automatically charges only for overage and credits or forbids substitutions per configuration. differentiator

menu-pricing-included-allowance

Two independent enumerations of the modifier surface agree, and neither has an included-allowance construct. The help article enumerates every field: 'your modifier name, price, online visibility, default selection and stock status', plus a required minimum, a maximum number of selections when more than one modifier is allowed, a 150-character text limit, and 3-level nesting. Pricing is flat per modifier, in either direction - 'The price field accepts both positive and negative values', with a negative price used 'for modifiers that discount the item when a component is removed or substituted'. The OpenAPI spec's data model matches: CatalogModifierList and CatalogItemModifierListInfo expose min_selected_modifiers, max_selected_modifiers, allow_quantities and a per-modifier price_money, and none of the 1,294 distinct property names carries an included-count or overage concept. max_selected_modifiers is a hard cap on how many may be chosen, not a free allowance above which overage is charged, and there is no substitution-credit rule. https://squareup.com/help/us/en/article/5119-create-and-manage-item-modifiers · retrieved 2026-09-10

Supports combo/meal construction where components can be swapped with a price delta, and the system can automatically detect and convert eligible a-la-carte items in the cart into the combo price.

menu-pricing-combos

Combos shipped in the May 2025 F&B release ('bundle multiple items at discounts'). Component swap with price delta and automatic cart detection of eligible a-la-carte items not documented. https://squareup.com/us/en/press/releases-food-and-beverage · retrieved 2026-08-01

Upsell/suggestive-sell prompts can be configured per item and per channel (POS, kiosk, online), and the vendor reports attach-rate on those prompts. differentiator

menu-pricing-upsell-prompts

'Smart Upsells automatically suggests complementary items to buyers on the cart review screen during the self-serve ordering flow on Square Kiosk', up to 3 suggested items shown as cards, enabled at Settings > Device Management > Kiosk > Checkout > Upsells. Shortfalls against the claim: recommendations are 'automatically generated from your catalog data' with no per-item merchant configuration; the feature is documented for Square Kiosk only, not the Square for Restaurants POS or the online-ordering channel, so it is not configurable per channel; and no attach-rate or upsell-performance reporting is described. https://squareup.com/help/us/en/article/8661-manage-smart-upsells-on-square-kiosk · retrieved 2026-08-06

A single 86 action propagates automatically to POS, KDS, the vendor's own online ordering, kiosk, and connected third-party marketplaces, with a documented propagation latency.

menu-pricing-86-propagation

86ing in Square propagates to Uber Eats and DoorDash and to Square Online. No published propagation latency; kiosk propagation not stated. https://squareup.com/help/us/en/article/8515-set-up-uber-eats-integration-with-square · retrieved 2026-08-01

Supports per-item countdown/par counts that decrement on sale and automatically 86 the item at zero, with a scheduled auto-restore. differentiator

menu-pricing-countdown-auto-86

Stock counts decrement on sale and drive availability sync; scheduled auto-restore of an auto-86'd item is not documented. https://squareup.com/help/us/en/article/8610-manage-ingredient-inventory-with-square-restaurant-inventory · retrieved 2026-08-01

Menus, individual items, and prices can be scheduled to activate and deactivate automatically by day and time in the location's own timezone.

menu-pricing-dayparting

Catalog exposes PRICING_RULE and TIME_PERIOD objects for scheduled automatic price adjustment. Location-timezone handling and per-menu activation windows not explicitly documented. https://developer.squareup.com/docs/catalog-api/what-it-does · retrieved 2026-08-01

Supports distinct price books per channel (dine-in, pickup, delivery, kiosk, each third-party marketplace) including percentage-markup rules applied to a base price rather than manual per-item entry.

menu-pricing-channel-price-books

Per-location price overrides exist and marketplace menus sync from the Square catalog; percentage-markup rules applied per channel to a base price are not documented. https://squareup.com/help/us/en/article/8518-integrate-doordash-with-square · retrieved 2026-08-01

Supports dual pricing / cash-discount at the item level with the card price displayed as the base price, applied consistently across POS, kiosk, and online ordering, and printed on the receipt. differentiator

menu-pricing-dual-pricing

Surcharging (pass credit card fees to customers) shipped May 2025. Item-level dual pricing storing two prices with the card price as base, consistent across POS/kiosk/online, is not documented. https://squareup.com/us/en/press/releases-food-and-beverage · retrieved 2026-08-01

Stores allergen flags and nutrition values per item and publishes them to online ordering and third-party menus, and can derive nutrition from linked recipe components rather than manual entry.

menu-pricing-allergen-nutrition

The 'Prepared food and beverage' item type 'Includes optional nutritional information for buyers with calorie counts, dietary preferences, and allergens' - one of the dynamic item attributes that appear based on item type, surfaced to buyers in the online ordering flow. Shortfalls: the fields are documented at item level only, not per variation; nothing describes deriving nutrition from linked recipe components (Square has no first-party recipe/ingredient costing surface - that is the MarketMan integration); and publication of these fields to third-party marketplace menus (DoorDash, Uber Eats) is not documented. https://squareup.com/help/us/en/article/8335-create-and-edit-items · retrieved 2026-08-09

Menu items and modifiers can be linked to recipes/bills of materials so that a sale depletes theoretical inventory and yields item-level theoretical food cost. differentiator

menu-pricing-recipe-linkage

Over-generous. The cited article carries four disqualifying limits the note omits: Square Recipes is beta ('may change over time'), Plus/Premium only, items must be the Prepared Food & Beverage type, 'You can't create a recipe for an ingredient that itself has a recipe' (no sub-recipes), and — fatal for pizza and most restaurant menus — 'Items with multiple variations (for example, Small, Medium, Large) can't have recipes.' A recipe layer that cannot cover sized items is partial at best. https://squareup.com/help/us/en/article/8629-beta-track-ingredient-costs-with-square-recipes · retrieved 2026-08-01 adversarially verified

Pushes menus to third-party marketplaces through a certified direct integration (not scraping or a menu-management middleman) and surfaces per-item sync status and rejection errors to the operator.

menu-pricing-3p-menu-push

Direct certified integrations to DoorDash and Uber Eats push menus, prices, images and availability from the Square catalog. A dedicated troubleshooting article exists, but per-item sync status and rejection errors surfaced in-product are not documented. Grubhub is not a direct integration. https://squareup.com/help/us/en/article/8517-troubleshoot-doordash-and-uber-eats-integration-with-square · retrieved 2026-08-01

Supports rule-based dynamic pricing where item price varies automatically by time, demand, or channel, with configurable floor/ceiling guardrails.

menu-pricing-dynamic-pricing

Automatic discounts can be scheduled, so effective price varies automatically by time: 'Toggle on/off Set schedule within the Discount schedule section to set the days of the week and times of day this discount is available' and 'Toggle on/off Set date range to set the dates this discount is available' - the documented happy-hour pattern ('use a discount schedule to set up Happy Hour offers'). One guardrail exists: 'You can set a maximum discount value for a discount to limit the total discounted amount applied to a purchase.' Shortfalls: this is a rule that discounts a fixed list price, not a rule that sets the price; there is no demand-based trigger; the only channel lever is an on/off application target ('Square Point of Sale and other integrations' vs 'Online'), not a per-channel price; and there is no price floor, only a discount ceiling. https://squareup.com/help/us/en/article/3955-create-and-manage-discounts · retrieved 2026-08-09

The POS operates with third-party payment processors of the merchant's choosing (documented list of supported processors/gateways) rather than requiring the vendor's in-house processing. differentiator

payments-processor-choice

Square is the merchant of record and processes all card volume itself. The fees article enumerates the whole payment-acceptance economics with no processor or gateway variable in it: 'you'll always pay one low rate per card payment'; 'Payment processing fees are taken out of the total amount of each transaction, including tax and tip. This fee covers all credit card fees and applies to every card brand at the same rate... and applies to all businesses'; 'Square's processing fees are deducted before funds are transferred to your linked bank account.' The only non-Square tenders it recognises are 'Cash, Check, and Other Tender'. Square's own security page states the structural reason: 'As the merchant of record, we maintain PCI certification so you don't have to individually validate your compliance,' and the Square Trust Center describes Square as 'a PCI DSS 4.0.1 Level 1 Service Provider'. No third-party gateway or processor list exists. https://squareup.com/help/us/en/article/5068-what-are-square-s-fees · retrieved 2026-08-09

Vendor publishes card-processing pricing publicly (a specific flat rate or interchange-plus markup) rather than quote-only. differentiator

payments-published-rates

Flat rates published per plan: 2.6/2.5/2.4% + 15c card present; 3.3%/2.9% + 30c online; 3.5% + 15c keyed and card-on-file. https://squareup.com/help/us/en/article/5068-what-are-square-s-fees · retrieved 2026-08-01

Native dual-pricing / cash-discount mode stores two prices per item and prints both cash and card totals on the guest check and receipt. differentiator

payments-dual-pricing

Surcharging shipped May 2025; a two-price-per-item model printing both cash and card totals on the guest check is not documented. https://squareup.com/us/en/press/releases-food-and-beverage · retrieved 2026-08-01

Surcharging engine automatically excludes debit and prepaid cards via BIN/product-code detection, enforces the network percentage cap, and can be enabled or disabled per location. differentiator

payments-surcharge-guardrails

'Surcharges only apply to credit card transactions. ACH, debit card transactions, tips, offline payments, and split tender payments can't have surcharges applied', and the supported surfaces 'automatically detect credit cards during checkout and apply your configured surcharge percentage'. Cap: 'Credit card surcharge configurations are capped at 3% of the total transaction in line with regulations.' Per-location: setup instructs you to 'select the applicable locations surcharges will be applied at'. Supported on Square Point of Sale, Square Restaurant POS, Square Retail POS and Square Invoices (web only). Shortfalls: prepaid cards are never mentioned, so prepaid exclusion is unconfirmed, and the article does not say the exclusion works by BIN or card product code -- only that credit cards are 'automatically detected'. https://squareup.com/help/us/en/article/8596-set-up-and-manage-card-surcharges · retrieved 2026-08-06

All first-party payment terminals accept EMV chip and NFC contactless including Apple Pay and Google Pay.

payments-emv-nfc

Square Handheld and the terminal line accept EMV chip plus NFC including Apple Pay, Google Pay, Samsung Pay and NFC cards. https://squareup.com/us/en/hardware/handheld/specs · retrieved 2026-08-01

Accepts contactless payments directly on a phone (Tap to Pay on iPhone and/or Android tap-to-pay) with no separate card reader. differentiator

payments-softpos-tap-to-pay

Tap to Pay on iPhone and Tap to Pay on Android are named Square payment methods (listed among methods unavailable in offline mode, confirming they exist online). https://squareup.com/help/us/en/article/7777-process-card-payments-with-offline-mode · retrieved 2026-08-01

Vendor ships a handheld that takes EMV/NFC payment at the table, including tip prompt and check splitting, without carrying the card away.

payments-pay-at-table

Square Handheld takes EMV/NFC payment at the table; splitting by item/seat and tipping are supported on-device. https://squareup.com/us/en/hardware/handheld/specs · retrieved 2026-08-01

Guest can scan a QR code on the printed check or table tent to view and pay the check from their own phone, with the payment closing the check in the POS automatically. differentiator

payments-qr-guest-pay

Documented end to end in the help centre, not just claimed in marketing. 'Scan to Pay allows your customers to pay for their meal by scanning a QR code on their printed receipt.' Enabled per device mode (Settings > Device Management > Modes > Checkout > Payment > toggle ON Scan to Pay, then Printed receipt > toggle ON QR code on receipts) and printed from the check itself: 'tap Floor plan > choose the section... Select a table > Print bill.' The payment closes the check automatically: 'Once paid, you'll receive a notification that says "Checks have been paid with a QR code" on your point-of-sale device. Paid orders are moved to the Closed section of the Orders tab and will show as "Paid via QR Code",' and the payments appear in the Sales summary report. Tier note: the article scopes this to Square for Restaurants Plus and Premium subscribers, not the Free plan. https://squareup.com/help/us/en/article/8456-checkout-with-scan-to-pay · retrieved 2026-08-09

Supports both pre-auth-then-tip-adjust and on-device tip prompt flows, with a documented batch/adjust window and a manager screen for unadjusted tips.

payments-tip-adjust

On-device tip prompt is standard across Square hardware. Pre-auth-then-adjust flow, batch/adjust window, and a manager unadjusted-tips screen are not documented.

Configurable tip pooling and distribution rules (by hours worked, sales, role percentage, or points) that produce a per-employee tip allocation exportable to payroll. differentiator

payments-tip-pooling

Tip pooling by user-defined percentage split daily or weekly among tip-eligible jobs, allocated by hours worked within a job; feeds Square Payroll. https://squareup.com/help/us/en/article/7654-get-started-with-tip-pooling-for-team-management · retrieved 2026-08-01

Card payments can be captured while the internet is down via store-and-forward, with configurable per-transaction and cumulative offline limits. differentiator

payments-offline-store-and-forward

Configurable max per offline transaction from $1 to $50,000 (defaults to $100 when enabled); Register/Terminal/Handheld accept offline indefinitely, Reader/Stand for 24 hours; 72-hour upload deadline. https://squareup.com/help/us/en/article/7777-process-card-payments-with-offline-mode · retrieved 2026-08-01

Vendor publicly documents who bears the loss when a stored offline transaction declines on reconnect, and surfaces a post-reconnect report of failed offline payments. differentiator

payments-offline-decline-liability

Explicit and unambiguous: 'You're responsible for any expired, declined, or disputed payments accepted while taking offline payments.' A separate View Offline Payments report exists post-reconnect. https://squareup.com/help/us/en/article/8551-view-offline-payments · retrieved 2026-08-01

First-party gift cards with real-time balance tracking, redeemable across every location in the group and through the online-ordering channel.

payments-gift-cards

Square Gift Cards are a first-party stored-value product with real-time balances; named as a Square payment method (excluded offline). https://squareup.com/help/us/en/article/7777-process-card-payments-with-offline-mode · retrieved 2026-08-01

House/on-account tabs with per-account credit limits, running balance, and periodic statement or invoice generation.

payments-house-accounts

'You can establish a spending limit for the account and the customer can make purchases within that limit'; 'You can see a running balance of the customer's house account and send an invoice to collect payment at a later time'; and 'An account balance statement that includes transaction details will be attached to the invoice as a PDF', with invoices sendable one-time or on a recurring schedule. Accounts can be limit-set, locked/unlocked and archived from Dashboard or point of sale. Scope confirmed for this product: squareup.com/help/us/en/article/8421 lists Square House Accounts among the order-and-pay capabilities of Square for Restaurants. Exclusion noted in the article: house accounts cannot be charged from Square Virtual Terminal. https://squareup.com/help/us/en/article/8034-create-and-charge-square-house-accounts · retrieved 2026-08-06

A single check can be settled with multiple tenders and split by seat, by item, by even shares, or by arbitrary amount, with no hard cap below eight ways.

payments-split-tender

Multiple tenders on one check are documented: 'You can use multiple forms of tender to complete a payment via the Square apps from a mobile device or Square hardware, as well as via Square Virtual Terminal,' with 'Tap Split Amount and enter the payment amount for the first payment... You can also split the sale into equal payments.' Arbitrary-amount splitting is therefore documented, contrary to the earlier note, and by item, by seat and even N-way splitting are documented in article 8165. Shortfalls, both stated by Square: 'A split tender must be completed within five minutes. If it takes longer than five minutes, it could timeout the bill and void any previously processed payments,' and 'When you connect Square Terminal with Square Point of Sale, split tender is not available if one of the payments is by card.' No maximum number of ways is published either way, so the claim's 'no hard cap below eight' is unverified rather than met. https://squareup.com/help/us/en/article/5097-process-split-tender-payments-with-square · retrieved 2026-08-09

Voids, refunds, discounts, and no-sales require role-based authorization (manager PIN or approval) and write to an immutable audit log identifying the approver.

payments-refund-void-controls

Advanced Access provides 'unlimited custom permission sets so you can delegate responsibilities and control what your team can see and do, such as issue refunds or edit orders', and an activity log with individual attribution: 'You can monitor actions taken by individual team members through the Activity Log, such as refunds, discounts, and voided transactions.' Voids and comps additionally require a reason at the point of action and a passcode or permission to act on another team member's check (article 8166). Shortfalls: no-sales are not named among the gated actions; the log is not described as immutable or tamper-evident; and nothing documents a separate approver identity distinct from the acting user. https://squareup.com/us/en/staff/advanced-access · retrieved 2026-08-09

In-product dispute/chargeback dashboard that lists open disputes and allows evidence submission assembled from the POS transaction record. differentiator

payments-chargeback-tooling

The researcher simply failed to find the docs. Square publishes a full dispute workflow in the support center: Dashboard > Orders & payments > Disputes, a 7-day response window, evidence-format rules (HEIC/JPEG/PDF/PNG/TIFF, <5MB, <15 pages), per-reason-code response guides, a dispute reports view, and an AI evidence assistant for 'goods not received'. This is product documentation, not marketing. https://squareup.com/help/us/en/article/3882-payment-disputes-walkthrough · retrieved 2026-08-01 adversarially verified

Tokenized card-on-file for a guest profile, reusable across online ordering, phone orders, and in-store, with no PAN stored by the merchant. differentiator

payments-card-on-file

Card-on-file is a distinct published pricing category (3.5% + 15c), implying tokenized stored cards reusable across channels with no PAN at the merchant. https://squareup.com/help/us/en/article/5068-what-are-square-s-fees · retrieved 2026-08-01

Vendor publishes its deposit schedule and offers a next-day or same-day/instant funding option. differentiator

payments-payout-timing

Fee schedule documents ACH transfer at 1% ($1 min) and free instant deposit to Square Checking, implying a published instant-funding option; the standard deposit calendar was not re-verified. https://squareup.com/help/us/en/article/5068-what-are-square-s-fees · retrieved 2026-08-01

Vendor provides point-to-point encryption and a current PCI DSS 4.x Attestation of Compliance / P2PE listing available to merchants on request.

payments-p2pe-pci4

Square publishes an on-request compliance library. The Trust Center holds 'PCI DSS AOC' (document 'Square PCI DSS 4.0.1 Service Providers AOC 2026'), described as 'Square is certified as a PCI DSS 4.0.1 Level 1 Service Provider, the highest level of PCI DSS validation. We validate this certification on an annual basis'; a 'PCI DSS Merchant Responsibility Matrix' (4.0.1) that 'outlines which PCI DSS requirements are managed by Square and which remain the responsibility of the seller'; and 'End to End Encryption (E2EE)' (document 'Square P2PE-E2EE Statement letter'), stating Square 'protects payment data by encrypting it at the point of capture' and that 'An independent attestation of Square's E2EE architecture is available.' Each is gated behind an NDA request, which is the ordinary 'available to merchants on request' posture the claim describes. The encryption itself is corroborated first-party: 'Our proprietary system ensures no unencrypted payment data touches your device or application... All card-present payments are encrypted from end to end.' Retrieval note: trust.squareup.com is a JavaScript (Vendict) SPA; the item index was read from its public backing API, and the same items render in a browser. https://trust.squareup.com/ · retrieved 2026-08-09 · not refetchable · site policy · graded B when read

Items route to specific KDS stations by item, category, order type, or revenue center, with routing rules configurable per location without vendor involvement.

kitchen-station-routing

Route specific items to different prep stations; ticket layouts and text size customizable per station. https://squareup.com/help/us/en/article/7959-route-orders-with-your-kds · retrieved 2026-08-01

An expo screen consolidates items from multiple prep stations into a single order view and only marks the order complete when every contributing station has bumped its items.

kitchen-expo-consolidation

Expeditor (Expo) mode gives high-level visibility across prep stations and finalizes orders for delivery to diners. https://squareup.com/us/en/point-of-sale/restaurants/kitchen-display-system · retrieved 2026-08-01

Items can be assigned to courses and held, then fired to the kitchen on demand from a server terminal, handheld, or expo screen. differentiator

kitchen-course-firing

Courses can be held and fired; firing releases to printers and KDS. https://squareup.com/help/us/en/article/7748-coursing-with-square-kds · retrieved 2026-08-01

Per-item cook times are configurable and the KDS staggers item start/display times so that all items on an order finish simultaneously. differentiator

kitchen-prep-time-pacing

Under Tickets > Prep timing there is a 'Staggered item prep times' toggle (Dashboard: Settings > Device management > Devices > KDS device > Manage > Tickets; or in-app Settings > View all settings > Tickets). 'Items within a ticket will appear on the KDS at staggered times based on their individual prep times, so kitchen staff can start each item at the right moment', and items must have prep times set in the item catalog for it to work. Corroborated by article/8168: 'If you've enabled Staggered item prep times, items within a ticket may appear at different times based on their individual prep times.' Shortfall: the article warns 'Item prep times do not sync across devices. Any staggered prep times for items are limited to one device', so items routed to different prep stations are not co-ordinated to finish together -- the pacing is per-screen, not per-order. https://squareup.com/help/us/en/article/7944-get-started-with-square-kds-android · retrieved 2026-08-06

Kitchen load throttling automatically paces or delays release of incoming digital orders, or extends quoted prep times, once a configurable order-volume or ticket-time threshold is crossed. differentiator

kitchen-order-throttling

The online-ordering profile settings include order limits per 15-minute window, order-scheduling advance days, cut-off times, 'Scheduled downtime' date ranges, and large-order item/price limits -- so incoming digital order volume can be paced against a configured order-volume threshold. Shortfall: the threshold is a static per-slot number the operator sets, not a measured kitchen-load or ticket-time signal; nothing feeds KDS ticket times back into intake, and no automatic extension of the quoted prep time on breach is documented (prep time is a fixed configured value). https://squareup.com/help/us/en/article/8609-set-up-delivery-options-for-your-online-ordering-profile · retrieved 2026-08-06

Pausing a store or 86ing an item from the POS/KDS propagates the pause or availability change back to connected third-party marketplaces (DoorDash, Uber Eats, Grubhub) automatically. differentiator

kitchen-channel-pause-propagation

86ing in Square makes the item unavailable on Uber Eats; the store can be paused on Uber Eats from Square Dashboard (Channels > Uber Eats > Manage > Pause). https://squareup.com/help/us/en/article/8515-set-up-uber-eats-integration-with-square · retrieved 2026-08-01

Bumping an order ready on the KDS sends an order-ready status event back to the third-party marketplace so couriers are dispatched on actual readiness. differentiator

kitchen-order-ready-callback

DoorDash publishes a machine-readable registry of its integration partners at https://merchants.doordash.com/api/partner-integrations — 64 providers, each tiered PREFERRED (12), CERTIFIED (47) or AT_RISK_OF_SUSPENSION (5), and each carrying an explicit true/false flag for 23 named integration features across four collections. It is served anonymously and merchants.doordash.com/robots.txt permits it. The programme is described, and its eight high-quality features defined in prose, at https://merchants.doordash.com/en-us/learning-center/doordash-preferred-integrations-program; the merchant-facing label for each flag comes from the label dictionary embedded in DoorDash's integrations comparison page. SCOPE: this attests the vendor's DOORDASH integration specifically — not Uber Eats, not Grubhub, and not the POS in general. DIRECTION: a true flag is a positive attestation; a false flag is NOT a reliable negative on its own, because Lavu's help centre documents a DoorDash temporary-closure control with scheduled auto-reopen while Lavu's `STORE_AVAILABILITY_WEBHOOKS` flag reads false, and Xenial's developer docs enumerate an order-ready notification while its `SUPPORT_ORDER_READY_SIGNAL` flag reads false. The flag `SUPPORT_ORDER_READY_SIGNAL` is TRUE for `square_v2_production`. The claim additionally requires that BUMPING AN ORDER READY ON THE KDS is what emits the event, and the registry carries no flag identifying the signal's trigger. A necessary condition is attested and a sufficient one is not. This also removes a dependence on Preferred membership as a premise, which the registry shows is unsound in general: `qubeyond_v2` is PREFERRED with 7 of 8 features and `checkmate` with 6. https://merchants.doordash.com/api/partner-integrations · retrieved 2026-09-12

KDS supports physical bump bars or programmable keypads in addition to touchscreen interaction, with documented supported models.

kitchen-bump-bar-hardware

Square KDS enumerates its compatible hardware and it is touchscreens only: 'MicroTouch 10.1"', 'MicroTouch 15.6"', 'MicroTouch 21.5"', 'VESA mount', plus any Android device meeting 'at least 3 GB of RAM', 'Google Play Store enabled' and 'Running AndroidOS 9 or above'. No bump bar, keypad or programmable input appears in that list or anywhere in the six-article KDS set. The interaction model is correspondingly all-touch: to complete work a cook must 'Tap the item directly on the display' or 'Tap the top banner of the ticket you want to complete', and recall is 'Tap Recall at the bottom of the ticket in the completed view.' The token `bumpbar` and the phrase `bump bar` both read zero across the 2,983-document corpus, against a positive control of 110 documents mentioning KDS. https://squareup.com/help/us/en/article/7944-get-started-with-square-kds-android · retrieved 2026-09-10

An all-day view aggregates outstanding quantities per item (and per modifier) across all open tickets on the station.

kitchen-all-day-counts

Square KDS aggregates within a ticket, not across the station's open tickets. The one grouping feature is Combine identical items, and its scope is stated: 'Identical items, such as the same item with identical or no modifications, will be automatically combined together into a single line item on tickets.' The rest of the KDS view surface is ticket-ordering rather than item-totalling - manual bump-to-front prioritisation, an Expo setting to 'Move ready tickets to front', staggered item prep times, category filtering and layout/column/text-size choices. No view sums outstanding quantities per item or per modifier across all open tickets. The phrase `all-day count` reads zero corpus-wide, and 'all day' occurs only in appointment-calendar and battery-life senses. https://squareup.com/help/us/en/article/8168-prioritize-orders-with-square-kds · retrieved 2026-09-10

Configurable target cook times per station or order type, with visual color escalation and/or audible alert when a ticket exceeds target.

kitchen-sla-alerts

KDS provides 'timers and alerts' for prioritizing orders. Configurable per-station target times with color escalation thresholds not documented. https://squareup.com/us/en/point-of-sale/restaurants/kitchen-display-system · retrieved 2026-08-01

If a KDS screen or kitchen printer goes offline, tickets automatically fail over to a designated backup printer or screen with no ticket loss. differentiator

kitchen-printer-fallback

The printer profile article enumerates the entire printer configuration surface - the job types ('Receipts', 'In-person order tickets', 'Online & kiosk order tickets', 'Order ticket stubs', 'Void tickets', 'Barcode Labels') and every setting under each - and there is no backup, failover or redundancy option among them. Routing is by category rather than by health: 'When an order includes an item that belongs to multiple categories, it triggers printing of the order ticket on each printer linked to a printer profile matching any of those categories.' Square's own remedy when a kitchen screen goes down is manual, not automatic: the KDS troubleshooting article advises that 'Restarting and updating software may require your KDS stations to be unavailable for taking orders. Using written paper tickets can make troubleshooting less stressful while your staff serves your customers in the meantime.' The phrase `backup printer` and the token `failover` both read zero across 2,983 documents, against 134 documents mentioning a printer. https://squareup.com/help/us/en/article/8245-set-up-printer-profiles · retrieved 2026-09-10

KDS continues to receive and display tickets from on-site POS terminals when the internet or cloud backend is unreachable. differentiator

kitchen-offline-operation

Square states offline KDS is a goal rather than a shipped capability. In a signed engineering post on the October 2025 AWS outage, under the heading Offline Payments, Square writes: 'We're actively expanding our offline capabilities and working to bring offline reliability to more tools, including the Kitchen Display System (KDS).' That is the vendor naming KDS as a tool offline reliability has not yet reached. It is consistent with the offline-payments documentation, which scopes offline operation to payment capture and enumerates the apps that support it - Square Point of Sale, Square Restaurants POS, Square Appointments POS and Square Retail POS - with KDS absent from that list. Graded D because the determining sentence is a newsroom post, dated 24 October 2025; no help-centre article states KDS offline behaviour in either direction. https://squareup.com/us/en/press/building-for-resilience · retrieved 2026-09-10

Station screens can display item-level build/assembly detail (recipe steps, portioning, or full modifier breakout) rather than only the ticket line text. differentiator

kitchen-item-build-screens

Ticket layouts and text sizes are customizable and modifiers display on the ticket; recipe-step or portioning build detail is not documented. https://squareup.com/help/us/en/article/7959-route-orders-with-your-kds · retrieved 2026-08-01

Sectioned/fractional topping placement (halves, quarters, specific sections) is rendered visually and unambiguously on the make-line screen or ticket. differentiator

kitchen-pizza-fractional-display

Upheld. The old rationale reasoned from the menu model, which is correct but was never checked against the make-line documentation, and Square KDS has been substantially rebuilt since -- the iOS app was fully disabled on 12 January 2026 and Android is now the only kitchen display. The current KDS document set (setup, routing, coursing, prioritisation, category filtering, completion, kitchen-facing names, troubleshooting) documents what a ticket can show, and sectioned or fractional topping placement is not among it; `topping placement`, `sectioned`, `half topping` and `split topping` occur zero times across a 1,693-document corpus read 2026-09-09 (482 developer pages from the vendor own llms-full.txt, which declares its own count of 482 and matched on the split; 1,210 squareup.com pages covering the 830-article Support Center and the product, hardware, release-note and Square University sections; and the 255-path, 1,478-schema OpenAPI specification rendered as a searchable artefact of paths, schema names, property names, enums and descriptions -- 15.9M characters), tokenised and as bare substrings. Modifiers reach the ticket as text lines, which is exactly the failure mode the claim is about. Square DOES render one non-textual order attribute on the kitchen screen -- drive-thru vehicle descriptors, where 'On kitchen tickets and KDS, vehicle information appears at the top of the order (for example, Red SUV)' -- which shows the ticket layout is extensible and that Square has chosen not to extend it this way, rather than that nothing could be rendered. https://squareup.com/help/us/en/article/7944-get-started-with-square-kds-android · retrieved 2026-09-09

A bumped ticket can be recalled/unbumped, and an individual item can be refired or reprinted without re-entering the order.

kitchen-recall-refire

Square KDS supports completing and recalling orders. https://squareup.com/help/us/en/article/8171-complete-orders-with-square-kds · retrieved 2026-08-01

Edits made in the POS to an order already displayed in the kitchen visually flag the added, changed, or removed items on the live ticket. differentiator

kitchen-order-modification-alerts

Edits do reach the kitchen - the Retail POS cart article notes 'Adding new items and re-saving or charging the cart will also send those updates to the kitchen' - but nothing flags what changed on the live ticket. The KDS setup article enumerates the whole visual-configuration surface in eight steps: layout and columns and text size; 'Timers & Alerts' (yellow and red ticket timers plus a new-ticket sound); modifier text colours; item sort order; modifier-set sort order; and staggered item prep times. The only colour-coding Square documents is static and per-modifier-option - 'You can assign custom text colors to individual modifier options so kitchen staff can visually distinguish between different types of modifications' - which marks the kind of modifier, not that an item was added, changed or removed after the ticket fired. The timers colour a ticket by age, not by edit. https://squareup.com/help/us/en/article/7944-get-started-with-square-kds-android · retrieved 2026-09-10

Bumping an order ready triggers a guest-facing notification — SMS/text, app push, or an order-status display board — without a separate product purchase. differentiator

kitchen-guest-ready-notification

'When the order is marked as complete from the Square KDS app or POS, your guest will receive the order-ready text', with the trigger occurring at an Expeditor KDS station. Available to Square for Restaurants Plus and Premium subscribers (also Square Kiosk and Square KDS subscribers, and Square Plus/Premium with advanced restaurants capabilities), with no additional fee stated -- it is a setting, not a separate SKU. Prerequisite: Square KDS must be set up with at least one Kitchen Display device code using an Expeditor device. https://squareup.com/help/us/en/article/8069-text-customers-order-is-ready-with-square-for-restaurants · retrieved 2026-08-06

Waste, spoilage, and remakes can be logged directly at the kitchen/KDS screen with reason codes, and the entry depletes inventory.

kitchen-waste-logging

Waste and loss-trend monitoring is delivered by the Square Restaurant Inventory by MarketMan add-on ($99/mo/location), not natively at the KDS screen. https://squareup.com/us/en/press/square-restaurant-inventory-marketman · retrieved 2026-08-01

Reports actual ticket and per-station times (average and percentile) sliced by daypart, station, and order channel, exportable to CSV or an API.

kitchen-speed-of-service-reporting

'Kitchen performance reporting shows your completed ticket count and average completed ticket time across all devices and locations', reached at Reports > Operations > Kitchen performance. Shortfalls named on the page itself: 'The kitchen performance report only tracks tickets sent to your Square kitchen displays. Items and tickets sent to printers are not tracked', so any printer-driven station is invisible. The page documents averages only -- no percentile distribution -- and gives no daypart or order-channel slicing (the peer measure, per-station, is approximated only by KDS device name). CSV export is documented on the same page for section sales but not for kitchen performance. https://squareup.com/help/us/en/article/6433-reporting-with-square-for-restaurants · retrieved 2026-08-06

Generates prep lists or predicted prep quantities from historical sales and forecast demand, surfaced to kitchen staff as a daily prep task list.

kitchen-prep-forecasting

No prep list or predicted prep quantity is generated anywhere in the product. The token 'forecast' occurs in only 17 of 2,983 documents, and every occurrence is either Square's consumer-survey marketing series (the Square and Afterpay 'Festive Forecast' reports) or the Labor API's statement that Square exposes data so that someone else can forecast: the API lets 'third-party scheduling applications integrate with Square' and 'access data for labor forecasting, labor cost reporting, and optimizing staffing levels.' The phrase `prep list` reads zero corpus-wide. Square's only prep-time construct is per-item and static - item-level prep times feeding the KDS staggered-item-prep-time setting - not a quantity predicted from sales history and surfaced to the kitchen as a daily task list. https://developer.squareup.com/docs/labor-api/scheduling · retrieved 2026-09-10

Product includes a native in-house driver module: drivers are first-class entities with clock-in/out, assignment state (in-store / on-run / returning), and per-driver run history reportable from the POS itself (not via a third-party add-on).

delivery-driver-roster

Square's in-house delivery option is 'use your own staff to deliver local orders' — there is no driver entity, clock state, or per-driver run history in the product. https://squareup.com/help/us/en/article/8438-set-up-delivery-options-with-square-online · retrieved 2026-08-01

Provides a dedicated dispatch/expo screen showing undispatched orders, driver availability, and elapsed time per order, with multi-order run batching (assigning 2+ orders to one driver as a single run).

delivery-dispatch-board

Upheld, and Square now says so itself rather than merely omitting it. The claim wants a dispatch or expo screen showing undispatched orders, driver availability and elapsed time per order, with multi-order run batching. Square has an Order Manager with per-fulfilment tabs, but `undispatched`, `dispatch screen`, `expo screen`, `driver availability` and `run batching` occur zero times across a 1,693-document corpus read 2026-09-09 (482 developer pages from the vendor own llms-full.txt, which declares its own count of 482 and matched on the split; 1,210 squareup.com pages covering the 830-article Support Center and the product, hardware, release-note and Square University sections; and the 255-path, 1,478-schema OpenAPI specification rendered as a searchable artefact of paths, schema names, property names, enums and descriptions -- 15.9M characters), tokenised and as bare substrings, and the exact token `dispatch` reads only 4 times in the whole corpus: a webhook dispatching an inventory event, a dispatch_get_main_queue call in an Objective-C sample, an instruction to phone the delivery service provider 'To request a re-dispatch in the event that no courier arrives to pick up the order', and a release note about choosing the courier provider per location, where 'The updated delivery dispatch also sends item-level details (quantities, weights, descriptions, and pricing) to the courier' -- an outbound handoff, not a board the operator works from. Delivery is delegated by design: the cited article lists what the integration excludes, beginning with 'Dasher/driver lookup : Dasher status is not shared through the integration', the Uber Eats article says the same of 'Delivery driver lookup', and the Grubhub article routes driver-status questions to Grubhub. Square own courier network works the same way -- 'a professional courier is automatically dispatched to handle the pickup and delivery for you' -- so the dispatching decision, and therefore any batching of it, sits with the delivery service provider and never with the operator. The OpenAPI spec corroborates: FulfillmentDeliveryDetails carries courier_provider_name, courier_support_phone_number and a managed_delivery flag whose own description is 'The flag to indicate the delivery is managed by a third party (ie DoorDash), which means we may not receive all recipient information for PII purposes' -- and no driver, assignment or batch field at all. https://squareup.com/help/us/en/article/8518-integrate-doordash-with-square · retrieved 2026-09-09

Dispatch includes a live map view with geocoded stops and system-generated route sequencing (turn order optimization) for a multi-stop run, not just a static address list. differentiator

delivery-route-map

Neither delivery mode gives the operator a dispatch map with sequenced stops. In-house delivery is exactly the absence of a dispatch layer - the operator picks 'My own couriers', and the settings the article enumerates are 'a delivery region (either by postal code or radius), delivery and service fees, minimum order amount, and no-contact delivery', plus order timing, ticket-printing workflow and fulfilment hours. There is no driver entity, no stop list and no map. On-demand delivery hands the run to a partner courier instead: 'a professional courier is automatically dispatched to handle the pickup and delivery for you', and what is surfaced is that single courier's position - 'Both you and your customers can track the courier's live location'. That is one-order tracking of somebody else's driver, not system-generated turn order for a multi-stop run. The phrase `route optimization` reads zero across 2,983 documents. https://squareup.com/help/us/en/article/8438-set-up-delivery-options-with-square-online · retrieved 2026-09-10

Captures live driver GPS position from a driver-facing mobile app and surfaces it back to the dispatch screen. differentiator

delivery-driver-tracking

Upheld, but the old rationale was wrong twice and both errors are withdrawn. It said Square ships no driver-facing mobile app, so there is no GPS position to surface -- the first clause holds, the second does not: a courier position IS surfaced, because Square Online states that for orders fulfilled by its delivery partners 'Both you and your customers can track the courier's live location and will receive photo confirmation once the delivery is complete.' It also pointed the reader at DoorDash own portal at doordash.com/drive, which is not where this now lives; the mechanism is Square own delivery-service-provider network plus first-party DoorDash, Uber Eats and Grubhub integrations. The verdict survives because the claim conjoins two things Square has neither of: capture FROM a driver-facing mobile app the vendor ships, and surfacing back TO a dispatch screen. Square ships no driver app -- `driver app`, `driver location`, `track your driver` and `real-time location` are zero across a 1,693-document corpus read 2026-09-09 (482 developer pages from the vendor own llms-full.txt, which declares its own count of 482 and matched on the split; 1,210 squareup.com pages covering the 830-article Support Center and the product, hardware, release-note and Square University sections; and the 255-path, 1,478-schema OpenAPI specification rendered as a searchable artefact of paths, schema names, property names, enums and descriptions -- 15.9M characters) -- and no dispatch screen exists to surface anything to. What it has instead is a read-only consumer-grade tracking link on somebody else's courier, and the cited article states the limit of even that: 'Delivery driver lookup : Driver status is not shared through the integration.' Of the 29 occurrences of driver and drivers in the corpus, most are a driver's licence for identity verification or a printer driver. https://squareup.com/help/us/en/article/8515-set-up-uber-eats-integration-with-square · retrieved 2026-09-09

Delivery areas can be defined as arbitrary map polygons or by drive-time isochrones, not solely as a radius or a ZIP/postcode list. differentiator

delivery-zones-polygon

Square documents the alternative explicitly: delivery region is set 'either by postal code or radius'. No polygon or drive-time isochrone option. https://squareup.com/help/us/en/article/8438-set-up-delivery-options-with-square-online · retrieved 2026-08-01

Each delivery zone carries its own independently configurable delivery fee, order minimum, and quoted promise time, applied automatically from the validated customer address.

delivery-zone-pricing

Distance-based fees, service fees and a minimum order amount are configurable. A per-zone quoted promise time is not documented. https://squareup.com/help/us/en/article/8438-set-up-delivery-options-with-square-online · retrieved 2026-08-01

Address entry is validated/geocoded against a mapping service at order time and rejects or flags out-of-zone addresses before the order is accepted.

delivery-address-validation

In-house delivery areas are defined by 'Postal Code' or 'Radius' with distance-based fee tiers and a fallback fee, and the profile carries an explicit rule for addresses outside those areas -- optionally routing them to 'On-demand delivery' with a configurable fee split (customer pays full, merchant pays full, split, or customer pays a set amount) -- so an address is evaluated against the zone before the order is taken. Shortfalls: the page never states that the address is validated or geocoded against a mapping service, does not describe rejecting a malformed or non-existent address, and describes no out-of-zone messaging when the on-demand handoff is not enabled. https://squareup.com/help/us/en/article/8609-set-up-delivery-options-for-your-online-ordering-profile · retrieved 2026-08-06

Tracks per-delivery driver compensation inputs — mileage or distance driven per run, per-delivery flat reimbursement, and driver-retained tips — and exports them to payroll as separate reimbursement vs. wage lines. differentiator

delivery-driver-comp

There is no driver entity in the product to attach compensation to. Square's in-house option is described only as using 'your own staff to deliver local orders', and the enumerated delivery settings cover region, fees, minimum order, no-contact, timing, printing and hours - nothing per-run or per-driver. The token `mileage` reads zero across the 2,983-document corpus and is absent from the OpenAPI spec's 1,294 property names; the delivery fields Square does model are courier-facing rather than employee-facing (courier_pickup_at, courier_provider_name, courier_support_phone_number, square_delivery_id, external_delivery_id). Under on-demand delivery the driver is the partner's, and Square's DoorDash integration lists 'Dasher/driver lookup' among its unsupported features. No per-delivery reimbursement or driver-retained-tip line reaches Square Payroll as a separate reimbursement-versus-wage export. https://squareup.com/help/us/en/article/8438-set-up-delivery-options-with-square-online · retrieved 2026-09-10

Provides a driver cash bank / settle-up flow that reconciles cash collected, orders assigned, and tips owed at end of shift, producing a per-driver over/short figure.

delivery-cash-reconcile

Square's cash reconciliation unit is the drawer session, not the driver. The cash drawer report is organised by drawer and device - 'Cash drawer management helps you to know how much cash you start with and what to expect in the drawer at the end of the session', viewed under Reports > Payments > Cash drawers, where the available columns are enumerated as 'Paid In', 'Paid Out', 'Device' and 'Location'. There is no per-driver bank, no assignment of orders to a driver for settle-up, and no per-driver over/short figure, because in-house delivery has no driver record at all - it is 'use your own staff to deliver local orders'. The phrases `driver bank` and `settle-up` both read zero across 2,983 documents. https://squareup.com/help/us/en/article/8358-view-cash-drawer-reports · retrieved 2026-09-10

Can hand a first-party order to an on-demand courier marketplace (DoorDash Drive, Uber Direct, Nash, Relay or equivalent) natively from the POS, with the courier quote and status returning into the order record.

delivery-daas-dispatch

Verified against Square's legal pricing page, and the dossier actually understates it: Square On-Demand Delivery uses three DSPs, not one — Uber ($4.20 + $0.75/km; CA $4.50 + $0.95/km), DoorDash (the quoted $6.99 / $8.99 CA / $9.98 NYC per delivery up to 5 miles + $1/additional mile to 10 miles) and Nash (variable). Page last updated March 16, 2026. The sub-claim that in-house dispatch fees were removed Feb 6 2025 was not visible on the current page and should be treated as unverified. Note this is DaaS handoff only and does not disturb the correct 'no' on native dispatch/driver roster. https://squareup.com/us/en/legal/general/odd-pricing · retrieved 2026-08-01 adversarially verified

Supports hybrid dispatch: rules that automatically overflow an order to a DaaS courier when no in-house driver is available, out of zone, or past a wait threshold. differentiator

delivery-daas-fallback

With delivery method set to 'My own couriers', the profile offers 'On-demand delivery' for orders outside the defined in-house zones, with a configurable fee split for those out-of-zone orders (customer pays full, merchant pays full, split, or customer pays a set amount). The on-demand leg has a 'Partner preference' of 'DoorDash' or 'Best Available' (Nash-powered). Shortfall: zone membership is the only documented trigger -- there is no rule that overflows to a courier when no in-house driver is available or when a wait-time threshold is exceeded, and Square documents no in-house driver availability state that such a rule could read. https://squareup.com/help/us/en/article/8609-set-up-delivery-options-for-your-online-ordering-profile · retrieved 2026-08-06

Offers direct, first-party certified API integrations with DoorDash, Uber Eats, and Grubhub marketplaces (vendor-owned, not solely resold through Otter/Deliverect/Chowly/ItsaCheckmate middleware). differentiator

delivery-3p-direct-integration

Direct first-party integrations with DoorDash and Uber Eats. Grubhub is not a direct Square integration and requires middleware (Deliverect, Chowly, Otter, Checkmate). https://squareup.com/help/us/en/article/8518-integrate-doordash-with-square · retrieved 2026-08-01

Third-party marketplace orders inject automatically into the POS as normal tickets that fire to KDS/printers without tablet re-keying or manual accept.

delivery-3p-injection

Marketplace orders 'flow through to your Square account, appear on Order Manager, appear on KDS and trigger printers' — no tablet re-keying. https://squareup.com/help/us/en/article/8515-set-up-uber-eats-integration-with-square · retrieved 2026-08-01

Menu, pricing, modifiers, and photos publish from the POS master menu out to connected third-party marketplaces, including channel-specific price markups, without maintaining a separate menu in each portal.

delivery-menu-push

Menus, prices, item images and availability sync automatically from Square. Channel-specific price markups are not documented. https://squareup.com/help/us/en/article/8515-set-up-uber-eats-integration-with-square · retrieved 2026-08-01

Marking an item or modifier 86'd in the POS pushes item-level out-of-stock status to connected third-party channels in near real time, and restores it on availability (DoorDash requires item and item-option 86ing of new POS partners).

delivery-86-sync

86ing an item in Square makes it unavailable on Uber Eats; item availability updates sync automatically to DoorDash. https://squareup.com/help/us/en/article/8518-integrate-doordash-with-square · retrieved 2026-08-01

Store can be paused/deactivated on each connected third-party marketplace from inside the POS with a timed auto-reactivation, rather than only from each marketplace's own tablet or portal.

delivery-store-pause

Uber Eats store pause from Square Dashboard is documented. Timed auto-reactivation is not, and equivalent DoorDash pause from Square is not confirmed. https://squareup.com/help/us/en/article/8515-set-up-uber-eats-integration-with-square · retrieved 2026-08-01

Produces a third-party reconciliation report matching marketplace payout deposits to POS-recorded 3P sales, itemizing commission, marketing fees, refunds/adjustments, and identifying missing or unpaid orders. differentiator

delivery-3p-reconciliation

Partial, and the shortfall is that the reconciliation is a banking view rather than a report. Marketplace orders do flow into Square reporting - the DoorDash integration means 'All DoorDash orders placed on DoorDash will flow through to your Square account' - and Square reconciles the partner's deposit against what it advanced: a deposit shows a 'Future deposit adjustment' section when Instant Payouts paid more than the partner's deposit and a 'Credited' section when it paid less, each read against 'the Original amount listed on the deposit from your delivery partner'. Item- and jurisdiction-level tax breakdowns carry 'Remitted by DoorDash' labels. But that view requires a Square Checking account and enrolment in Instant Payouts, it lives under Banking > Checking rather than in Reports, commission and promotional marketing fees appear only as an illustrative worked example in prose rather than as itemised report columns, and no missing-or-unpaid-order detection is documented. https://squareup.com/help/us/en/article/8327-review-your-instant-payouts-deposits · retrieved 2026-09-10

Vendor exposes integration health to the operator — failed/rejected order injections, connection status per channel, and alerts on failure — rather than failing silently. differentiator

delivery-injection-error-visibility

Square maintains a dedicated DoorDash/Uber Eats troubleshooting article, but an in-product integration-health view with failed-injection alerts is not documented. https://squareup.com/help/us/en/article/8517-troubleshoot-doordash-and-uber-eats-integration-with-square · retrieved 2026-08-01

Guests receive a branded order status / driver tracking page or SMS link on the restaurant's own domain for first-party delivery orders, driven by real order and driver state.

delivery-tracking-page

Under Communications > Email & Text Alerts you can 'Send order status text messages to customers', covering 'Order status changes (like Ready for Pickup, Order Shipped, etc.)'; for in-house delivery 'customers can sign up for text alerts to receive updates as their items get prepared and dispatched'. Shortfall against the claim's first-party scope: the live map is documented only for ON-DEMAND courier delivery -- 'you can enable text alerts that provide customers with a live map for real-time order tracking and updates' -- while in-house delivery gets prepared/dispatched status texts driven by order state, not driver state. No branded status page served on the restaurant's own domain is documented, and the article is a Square Online setting rather than a Square for Restaurants POS one. https://squareup.com/help/us/en/article/6889-customize-store-emails-with-square-online-store · retrieved 2026-08-06

Quoted delivery promise times adjust dynamically from current kitchen load, driver availability, and zone drive time, rather than a fixed per-store constant. differentiator

delivery-promise-time

Both the in-house-courier and on-demand delivery profiles expose an 'automatic vs manual delivery time calculation' choice, on top of a configured prep time and delivery areas defined by radius with distance-based tiers -- so a quoted time can be system-computed and vary with distance rather than being a single per-store constant. Shortfall: the page does not say what the automatic calculation consumes; no kitchen-load input is described (there is no link between KDS ticket times and the quote), and Square documents no in-house driver availability state that could feed it. The only load-adjacent control is a static order limit per 15-minute window. https://squareup.com/help/us/en/article/8609-set-up-delivery-options-for-your-online-ordering-profile · retrieved 2026-08-06

Vendor documents explicit offline behavior for delivery: whether cash delivery orders, driver assignment, and driver settlement continue during an internet outage.

delivery-offline-behavior

Square states offline delivery-order intake behaviour explicitly: 'Depending on the type of disruption, new online orders received through your Square website or ordering platforms, such as UberEats, won't appear in your POS.' The article also lists which apps support offline payments (including Square Restaurants POS), which tender types do not work offline (Afterpay, Cash App Pay, Square Gift Cards, Tap to Pay, manually-entered cards), and that close-of-day reporting cannot be completed offline. Shortfall: driver assignment and driver settlement during an outage are not addressed anywhere in the article, and cash delivery orders specifically are not called out -- only cash tendering generally is implied by the offline payment scope. https://squareup.com/help/us/en/article/7777-process-card-payments-with-offline-mode · retrieved 2026-08-06

Vendor ships a first-party, commission-free web ordering site on the restaurant's own branding/domain that writes orders directly into the POS with no per-order marketplace commission.

digital-first-party-web

Square Online: rebuilt branded ordering page with commission-free pickup and delivery; Square estimates up to 30% savings versus marketplaces. https://squareup.com/us/en/press/releases-food-and-beverage · retrieved 2026-08-01

The web/app ordering menu is generated from the same POS menu record as in-store — one item edit propagates to all first-party digital channels without a separate digital menu build.

digital-menu-single-source

Square Online is generated from the same Square catalog as the POS. The current capabilities page states it twice: 'Sync menus and inventory in real time so diners never order unavailable items,' and, of online ordering, 'Onboard in minutes and manage all your menus and orders from one dashboard with real-time menu syncing to have total control of your business.' Also documented on the item side: article 8335 shows one item library with menus as the grouping surface for prepared food and beverage items. Grade C because the retrieved page is a first-party feature page written to sell, not product documentation. https://squareup.com/us/en/restaurants/capabilities · retrieved 2026-08-09

Vendor offers a branded native iOS and Android ordering app (published under the restaurant's own brand in the App Store/Play Store), not only a mobile web page or a shared multi-restaurant marketplace app. differentiator

digital-native-app

Upheld, and the one artefact that could have overturned it is the one the claim explicitly excludes. Square does publish a consumer app of its own, Square Go, and the cited article describes it as a shared discovery marketplace -- it 'seamlessly connects with Square so clients can discover, book, and rebook local beauty or personal care professionals' and 'attracts clients by recommending businesses that similar clients have visited'. It is multi-merchant, it is iOS-only, and it is a bookings product for beauty and personal care rather than restaurant ordering, so it fails the claim on three counts at once. The restaurant-side answer is a web storefront: Square markets Square Online to drive-thru operators as 'a branded website that lets customers order and pay ahead of pickup', a phrase that concedes the point. Across a 1,693-document corpus read 2026-09-09 (482 developer pages from the vendor own llms-full.txt, which declares its own count of 482 and matched on the split; 1,210 squareup.com pages covering the 830-article Support Center and the product, hardware, release-note and Square University sections; and the 255-path, 1,478-schema OpenAPI specification rendered as a searchable artefact of paths, schema names, property names, enums and descriptions -- 15.9M characters), `branded app`, `app under your brand`, `own branded` and `app builder` occur zero times, tokenised and as bare substrings; `white label` reads once, in the third-party specialists directory, describing what an outside agency will build for you rather than what Square publishes. Note that `native app` is NOT assertable as a zero here -- it matches 'native applications' in the Point of Sale API documentation, which is about custom URL schemes and not about branded ordering apps. https://squareup.com/help/us/en/article/8025-get-started-with-square-go · retrieved 2026-09-09

Guests can create an account with saved addresses, saved (tokenized) payment methods, and one-tap reorder of a previous order across first-party channels.

digital-account-saved-payment

Card-on-file tokenization is a published Square capability and Square Online supports customer accounts, but saved addresses plus one-tap reorder across first-party channels is not documented as a combined feature. https://squareup.com/help/us/en/article/5068-what-are-square-s-fees · retrieved 2026-08-01

Digital checkout presents configurable or algorithmic upsell/cross-sell suggestions (rules-based add-ons or personalized recommendations from order history), with attach-rate reporting on those suggestions. differentiator

digital-upsell-engine

Smart Upsells on Square Kiosk: 'Buyers see complementary item suggestions on the order review screen before they proceed to checkout. Up to 3 suggested items appear as cards,' added or dismissed in one tap. Selection is algorithmic - 'No additional setup is required beyond enabling the feature - recommendations are automatically generated from your catalog data'; items requiring unsatisfied modifiers and combo items are excluded. Requires the Square Kiosk app plus Square Plus or Premium. Shortfalls: no merchant-configurable rules for which items are suggested, no personalisation from an individual guest's order history, no attach-rate or upsell-performance reporting documented, and no equivalent on Square Online checkout (article 6859's checkout options list contains no upsell setting). https://squareup.com/help/us/en/article/8661-manage-smart-upsells-on-square-kiosk · retrieved 2026-08-06

Supports future/scheduled orders with per-daypart throttling — capacity limits on orders or items per time slot that automatically close slots when the kitchen is saturated.

digital-scheduled-pacing

Scheduled ordering with prep timing is configurable on the online ordering profile; per-daypart capacity limits that auto-close saturated slots are not documented. https://squareup.com/help/us/en/article/8609-set-up-delivery-options-for-your-online-ordering-profile · retrieved 2026-08-01

Single digital ordering flow supports pickup, curbside (with arrival check-in), dine-in/QR table ordering, and delivery, with mode-specific fees and prep timing.

digital-fulfillment-modes

Orders API defines Pickup, Shipment, Delivery and In-store fulfillments; Square Online exposes pickup, curbside, delivery and no-contact delivery with mode-specific fees. https://squareup.com/help/us/en/article/8438-set-up-delivery-options-with-square-online · retrieved 2026-08-01

Supports guest-facing QR scan-to-order and/or scan-to-pay at the table that opens or attaches to the existing POS check, including splitting and tipping.

digital-qr-table

Scan-to-pay at the table is fully documented and does attach to the existing POS check: the QR prints on the bill from the Floor plan or Orders tab, and on payment the check closes with the notification 'Checks have been paid with a QR code' and is marked 'Paid via QR Code'. Shortfalls: (1) QR scan-to-ORDER exists only as Square Online self-serve ordering, where 'each QR code is connected to a specific ordering station' and the completed order 'will appear on your point of sale' as a new order - nothing describes it joining a check already open on a table (article 7142); (2) neither article documents splitting or tipping inside the guest's QR flow; (3) Scan to Pay is Plus/Premium only. https://squareup.com/help/us/en/article/8456-checkout-with-scan-to-pay · retrieved 2026-08-09

Vendor ships a self-order kiosk running the same menu and modifier logic as the POS, with accessibility-compliant UI and unattended EMV payment. differentiator

digital-kiosk

Square Kiosk app runs the same catalog with unattended payment on an iPad-based stand ($149 hardware, $50/$30 per device per month software). Accessibility-compliant UI is not documented. https://squareup.com/us/en/point-of-sale/restaurants/pricing · retrieved 2026-08-01

Supports group ordering: a shareable link where multiple participants add their own items to one order under a per-person or total spend cap, with split or single payment.

digital-group-ordering

Square Online checkout setting: 'Group ordering lets multiple people add their individual items to a collective order at the same time, and each participant can use their own device to add to the cart.' The cart owner generates a shareable link; 'Additional guests who use the link will go directly to your site to start adding their own items.' Shortfall: no per-person or total spend cap of any kind, and no split payment - 'the cart owner can submit the order and pay' for the whole cart. Requires Square Online Plus/Premium or Square Plus/Premium, pickup, local delivery or QR ordering only. (Separately, the AU help centre uses 'group ordering' for an unrelated Square for Restaurants bistro-mode pay-separately flow at the counter.) https://squareup.com/help/us/en/article/6859-checkout-options-with-square-online-store · retrieved 2026-08-06

Offers a distinct catering ordering flow with separate catering menu/minimums, lead-time rules, quotes or proposals, deposits, and invoice/house-account or ACH payment terms. differentiator

digital-catering-portal

A catering POS mode was announced May 2025; a distinct catering ordering portal with minimums, lead-time rules, quotes, deposits and invoice/ACH terms is not documented. https://squareup.com/us/en/press/releases-food-and-beverage · retrieved 2026-08-01

Vendor offers AI voice phone ordering (native or a named certified partner) that answers inbound calls and injects the completed order into the POS without staff transcription. differentiator

digital-voice-ai-phone

'Square AI can answer calls to your Square business number and can help you take customer orders.' Orders are 'sent straight to your POS, Order Manager and Kitchen Display System (if set up)' once the guest pays via a texted cart link - no staff transcription. First-party Square, no third-party partner. Escalation exists: 'If Square AI can't address your customer's questions, we will notify you via Square Messages.' Gated on a Square Plus, Square Premium or Square Messages Plus subscription. https://squareup.com/help/us/en/article/8568-take-orders-with-ai-powered-voice-ordering · retrieved 2026-08-06

Supports AI voice ordering at the drive-thru lane, integrated with the POS menu/modifiers and with escalation-to-human handoff.

digital-drivethru-ai

Square ships AI voice ordering and a drive-thru mode, but not the two together. The two documented voice surfaces are the phone - Square AI 'can answer calls to your Square business number and can help you take customer orders', with escalation ('Get notified if a customer needs help') and orders 'sent straight to your POS, Order Manager and Kitchen Display System (if set up)' - and the kiosk, where 'Square Kiosk displays your menu to buyers on both the device touchscreen and through voice ordering.' Neither is a lane. Drive-Thru mode's own order-taking flow is a team member on the POS: 'start a new checkout and begin adding items to the cart', then select Drive-thru as the fulfilment method and key the vehicle colour and type. No lane microphone, speaker post or lane-side voice agent is documented. https://squareup.com/help/us/en/article/8647-set-up-drive-thru-mode-and-fulfillment · retrieved 2026-09-10

Supports conversational SMS or chat ordering/reordering (text-to-order or text-a-link) that lands in the POS.

digital-sms-ordering

Documented text-a-link ordering: guests 'receive and view your menu via text' and 'will receive a text message with a link to an online cart to complete checkout and pay online,' after which the order goes 'straight to your POS, Order Manager and Kitchen Display System.' Shortfall: this is documented only as a step inside the Square AI inbound-phone-call flow on a Square Plus/Premium/Messages Plus subscription; customer-initiated conversational text-to-order, and text-to-reorder, are not documented. Square Text Message Marketing remains outbound campaigns only. https://squareup.com/help/us/en/article/8568-take-orders-with-ai-powered-voice-ordering · retrieved 2026-08-06

Supports Order with Google — the restaurant's direct ordering link is provisioned to the Google Business Profile as an ordering option (ideally set as 'Preferred by Business'), rather than leaving marketplace links as the only choice. differentiator

digital-google-order

Square Online feature, enabled at Square Dashboard > Channels > Square Online > Website settings > Order with Google, with a per-location toggle and auto-sync of future locations. On the Google Business Profile the guest 'can select an ordering button to pick how they want to order, showing them all available options like your website or a third-party app... If they choose the Square option, they order right through your website.' Requires a claimed Google Business Profile, a published site, pickup and/or local delivery, and a food-and-beverage business category. The article does not use or document 'Preferred by Business' placement, so prioritisation over marketplace links is unconfirmed. https://squareup.com/help/us/en/article/7659-use-order-with-google-with-square-online · retrieved 2026-08-06

Supports Apple Business Connect ordering placement — an 'Order Food' custom action on the Apple Maps place card pointing at the vendor's first-party ordering flow.

digital-apple-business-connect

Square documents its place-card ordering placements and they are Google's, not Apple's. Order with Google puts the ordering action on Google surfaces - an ordering profile 'is discoverable in web search and connected to Order with Google, allowing customers to easily discover and order directly from your online ordering profile using Google Search and Maps at no extra cost' - and Square separately documents Google Business Profile setup and Reserve with Google. The phrases `Apple Business Connect` and `Apple Maps` each read zero across the 2,983-document corpus, against 180 documents mentioning Apple (all of them Apple Pay, iOS, iPad or App Store). No 'Order Food' custom action on an Apple Maps place card is documented. https://squareup.com/help/us/en/article/7659-use-order-with-google-with-square-online · retrieved 2026-09-10

Loyalty accrual and redemption work inside the first-party digital ordering flow using the same guest identity as in-store, not as a separate post-purchase enrollment.

digital-loyalty-attach

Customers earn points on purchases from Square POS, Square Invoices and the Square Online site under one loyalty program and identity. https://squareup.com/help/us/en/article/3952-create-a-loyalty-program-with-square · retrieved 2026-08-01

Supports guest subscription / membership programs (recurring billing for a delivery-fee waiver, a per-period item entitlement, or a paid loyalty tier) managed in the platform.

digital-subscriptions

Guest-facing recurring billing exists: any catalogue item can be made subscribable, with a chosen frequency, a billing start ('at the time the subscription starts, the last day of each month, or a billing date of your choice'), continuous or capped billing cycles ('After # of billing cycles'), an optional percentage or fixed 'Subscribe and save' discount, and customer-facing pause with a duration limit. Shortfall the vendor states explicitly: 'subscriptions don't support an entitlement feature. For example, if a gym offers five classes per month as part of a membership package, subscriptions won't keep track of how many classes a subscriber has already redeemed.' So no per-period item entitlement, no delivery-fee waiver and no paid loyalty tier - a recurring charge with a standing discount only. The article publishes a further not-available list: pickup as a fulfilment option, custom billing dates across a book of subscriptions, changing a plan's price after creation, swapping an item on an active subscription, and commitment periods. Availability is scoped to Square Subscriptions users, Square Online Plus/Premium and Square Plus/Premium, iOS and Dashboard only ('Plans and subscriptions cannot be managed from Android devices at this time'), and the article does not name Square for Restaurants. https://squareup.com/help/us/en/article/7627-get-started-with-subscriptions-in-dashboard · retrieved 2026-08-09

Discounts, coupon codes, and loyalty offers are defined once and honored identically across POS, kiosk, and first-party digital channels, with channel eligibility controls.

digital-promo-parity

Loyalty promotions and catalog discount objects are defined centrally and apply across Square channels; explicit per-channel eligibility controls including kiosk are not documented. https://squareup.com/help/us/en/article/7794-get-started-with-square-loyalty-promotions · retrieved 2026-08-01

Vendor documents that the operator owns and can export first-party guest records (email, phone, consented marketing status, order history) in bulk, without a fee or vendor approval. differentiator

digital-guest-data-ownership

Customer Directory CSV export is self-serve and the Customers API is public, but Square's terms grant Square a perpetual, transferable, sublicensable license to seller Content and promise no post-termination retrieval window. https://squareup.com/us/en/legal/general/ua · retrieved 2026-08-01

Digital checkout uses vendor-hosted fields or a hosted payment page so card data never touches the restaurant's page, with the vendor publishing PCI DSS 4.0 compliance (including the client-side script-integrity requirements effective March 2025) and supporting 3DS.

digital-checkout-pci-sca

Square is merchant of record and hosts checkout, so card data does not touch the restaurant's page ('no unencrypted payment data touches your device or application'). 3DS is documented and configurable, not merely asserted: 'Square 3D Secure (3DS) is a feature available to all sellers using Risk Manager - it's a standardized way to authenticate electronic card transactions,' enabled by a Risk Manager rule ('Under Select action, set your rule to Require 3D Secure'), with SMS/email one-time passcode, biometric or issuer redirect challenges and fraud-chargeback liability shift. PCI posture is published rather than merely asserted: the Trust Center lists a 'Square PCI DSS 4.0.1 Service Providers AOC 2026' and states 'Square is certified as a PCI DSS 4.0.1 Level 1 Service Provider... validated annually', plus a 4.0.1 Merchant Responsibility Matrix delineating which requirements are Square's and which the seller's. Caveats: the AOC and matrix are NDA-gated rather than freely downloadable, and 4.0.1 requirements 6.4.3/11.6.1 are covered by the scope of that attestation rather than called out by name; API card-on-file payments are excluded from 3DS. https://squareup.com/help/us/en/article/7623-risk-manager-3d-secure-3ds · retrieved 2026-08-09

Digital channels support the same service-fee / dual-pricing / card-surcharge configuration as the POS, with the required guest-facing disclosure and correct handling of jurisdictions and card brands where surcharging is prohibited. differentiator

digital-surcharge-transparency

Two different fee types diverge across channels. Service charges do carry: 'When creating a service charge, you can automatically apply the service charge to online orders. This only applies to orders fulfilled through pickup, delivery, QR code ordering, and orders placed through an online ordering profile' (article 7625). Card surcharging does not: the surcharge article's supported list is Square Point of Sale, Square Restaurant POS, Square Retail POS and Square Invoices (web only), with Square Kiosk, Virtual Terminal, Connected Terminal, Square Appointments and 'Square Website transactions' listed as unsupported - 'Card surcharges only work for in-person transactions.' Jurisdiction and brand handling is real but partly manual: surcharging is blocked in Connecticut, Maine and Puerto Rico, cannot apply to ACH, debit, tips, offline or split-tender payments, printed receipts carry an automatic surcharge notice, and the seller must post entrance/counter signage and verify other state rules themselves. Shortfall: the digital channels (Square Online, Kiosk) cannot surcharge at all, so the POS configuration does not carry identically. https://squareup.com/help/us/en/article/8596-set-up-and-manage-card-surcharges · retrieved 2026-08-06

Maintains a single guest profile that automatically merges transactions from in-store POS, first-party web/app ordering, and kiosk under one identity (phone or email match), with documented dedup/merge behavior.

guest-loyalty-unified-profile

A single loyalty/customer identity accrues across Square POS, Square Invoices and Square Online. Documented dedup/merge behavior on phone-or-email collision is not published. https://squareup.com/help/us/en/article/3952-create-a-loyalty-program-with-square · retrieved 2026-08-01

Orders arriving from third-party marketplaces (DoorDash, Uber Eats, Grubhub) attach to a native guest profile with usable guest identity rather than landing as anonymous tickets. differentiator

guest-loyalty-thirdparty-identity-attach

Square states the trade-off directly: ordering through a marketplace costs the operator the guest identity, which is why it pitches its own channel - 'Sending customers to your website instead of a third-party marketplace app means you can cut down on commission fees and increase your margins. You also get valuable customer information that's helpful for running marketing campaigns and getting repeat business.' The data model agrees; on a delivery fulfilment the managed_delivery flag is documented as 'The flag to indicate the delivery is managed by a third party (ie DoorDash)', and that in consequence Square 'may not receive all recipient information for PII purposes' Square Loyalty enrolment depends on a step a marketplace order never performs - the guest 'entering their mobile number right in the register, when submitting an invoice payment, or online when completing a purchase'. Marketplace tickets therefore arrive without a usable native guest profile. https://squareup.com/help/us/en/article/7659-use-order-with-google-with-square-online · retrieved 2026-09-10

Supports at least two of points-per-dollar, visit/punch-count, and spend-tier accrual as configuration, without custom development or a bolt-on loyalty vendor.

guest-loyalty-accrual-models

Points can be earned per visit, per amount spent, per item, or by category — three of the required models as plain configuration. https://squareup.com/help/us/en/article/3952-create-a-loyalty-program-with-square · retrieved 2026-08-01

Supports status tiers with automatic promotion and demotion driven by rolling-window spend or visit counts. differentiator

guest-loyalty-tiers

Up to six tiers including the base tier, with points multipliers and tier benefits; customers get SMS on tier upgrade and downgrade, confirming automatic promotion and demotion. https://squareup.com/help/us/en/article/8077-create-square-loyalty-tiers · retrieved 2026-08-01

Documents explicitly what loyalty lookup, accrual, and redemption do when the POS loses connectivity (queue-and-reconcile vs blocked). differentiator

guest-loyalty-offline-behavior

Explicitly documented as blocked: loyalty point accrual is in the list of features unavailable during offline mode. https://squareup.com/help/us/en/article/7777-process-card-payments-with-offline-mode · retrieved 2026-08-01

Offer/discount engine exposes explicit stacking and precedence rules (exclusive vs combinable, order of application) as configuration. differentiator

guest-loyalty-offer-stacking-rules

The create/edit-discount configuration surface is enumerated in full at the merged article: name; amount type (Amount, Percentage, Variable amount, Variable percentage); applicable locations; item or category targeting; quantity rules (Exact quantity, Minimum quantity, Buy One Get One); customer group; minimum spend; schedule (days/times and date range); the 'Apply automatically' toggle and its channel targets (point of sale vs online); 'Set maximum discount value'; and under Advanced Settings, 'Require a passcode' and 'Apply discount after taxes'. Square states outright that this is the whole surface: 'Advanced rules (category targeting, BOGO, quantity, customer group, scheduling, and minimum spend) are available for both manual and automatic discounts. The difference between manual and automatic discounts is only how the discount is applied - not what rules it can have.' There is no exclusive-vs-combinable flag, no stacking permission and no precedence or order-of-application setting in that list. Stacking is presumed rather than configured: 'If your customer is applying multiple discounts, the limited time discounts will only be valid within their specified time frames' and 'the maximum discount value will only apply to the discounts with a set maximum discount value.' https://squareup.com/help/us/en/article/3955-create-and-manage-discounts · retrieved 2026-08-09

Offers can be issued to a dynamically defined audience (rules over recency, frequency, spend, or items purchased) rather than only broadcast to the whole list. differentiator

guest-loyalty-targeted-offers

Loyalty promotions can be created and Square Marketing campaigns targeted at customer groups; rules over recency/frequency/spend/items as an audience builder are not documented in detail. https://squareup.com/help/us/en/article/7794-get-started-with-square-loyalty-promotions · retrieved 2026-08-01

Automatically computes recency/frequency/monetary or equivalent lifecycle segments (new, regular, at-risk, lapsed, VIP) without the operator building the queries. differentiator

guest-loyalty-rfm-segmentation

Square Customer Directory automatic groups (e.g. loyal, casual, lapsed) are long-standing but I could not verify a current documentation URL in this pass.

Ships triggered lifecycle automations (birthday, first-visit thank-you, lapsed win-back) as configurable always-on campaigns rather than one-off manual sends.

guest-loyalty-lifecycle-automation

Square Marketing automations (birthday, win-back) are marketed but no current support-doc URL verified here; loyalty does ship automated tier-change and points-expiry SMS. https://squareup.com/help/us/en/article/8077-create-square-loyalty-tiers · retrieved 2026-08-01

Sends both email and SMS campaigns natively from the platform, not solely by handing the list to a third-party ESP. differentiator

guest-loyalty-native-email-sms

Square Loyalty integrates directly with Square Email Marketing and text message campaigns sent natively from the platform. https://squareup.com/help/us/en/article/3952-create-a-loyalty-program-with-square · retrieved 2026-08-01

Captures per-channel marketing consent with timestamp and source of consent, and honors revocation received by any reasonable means (not just the STOP keyword) across all channels.

guest-loyalty-consent-management

Consent is captured per channel and gated: 'Before your customers can receive text message campaigns, they will need to consent to receiving SMS marketing text messages, which they can do through your point of sale after a transaction,' and 'To comply with the Telephone Consumer Protection Act (TCPA), Square requires prior express written consent from every customer who enrolls in your loyalty program. This is done when a customer enters their phone number and click to join your loyalty program after reading the SMS and marketing disclosure provided.' Shortfalls: neither article documents a stored timestamp or source-of-consent field on the customer record; revocation handling is not described beyond channel unsubscribe, so honouring revocation received 'by any reasonable means' across all channels is unevidenced. One asymmetry worth flagging - article 5498 states 'A customer is automatically opted into email marketing if you manually input their email into their profile,' though 'You'll be unable to subscribe previously unsubscribed customers into email marketing using the import tool.' https://squareup.com/help/us/en/article/7199-get-started-with-text-message-marketing · retrieved 2026-08-09

Handles or explicitly documents A2P 10DLC brand and campaign registration required for the operator to send SMS through the platform.

guest-loyalty-10dlc-registration

Square handles carrier messaging registration for the seller: 'Each paid location receives a dedicated toll-free business number, subject to a mandatory industry-wide verification process,' and 'We request and submit the necessary business information to complete the verification process on your behalf,' which 'usually takes up to seven business days to complete.' Shortfalls: the setup article documents toll-free verification only - it never uses the terms A2P 10DLC, brand registration or campaign registration, does not list the business information submitted, and does not state what happens on rejection. 10DLC appears only in the Additional Point of Sale Terms of Service, which mentions 'a dedicated Toll-Free Number (TFN) or a 10-Digit Long Code (10DLC) number' for Square Messages Plus without describing any registration process. https://squareup.com/help/us/en/article/8494-set-up-and-manage-your-dedicated-business-number · retrieved 2026-08-06

Reports redemption and incremental sales attributable to a specific campaign or offer, tying redeemed offers to actual check totals. differentiator

guest-loyalty-campaign-attribution

Square publishes loyalty metrics reporting; tying redeemed offers to actual check totals as incremental-sales attribution per campaign is not documented. https://squareup.com/help/us/en/article/6467-view-your-square-loyalty-metrics · retrieved 2026-08-01

Provides self-serve export of the full guest list and transaction history, including contact PII, via CSV or API, without a vendor fee or support ticket. differentiator

guest-loyalty-data-export-portability

Customer records are exportable via CSV and the public Customers API with no fee. Whether the loyalty point ledger itself exports cleanly is not documented. https://developer.squareup.com/reference/square · retrieved 2026-08-01

Triggers post-transaction feedback requests and routes responses by score, sending low scores to private service recovery and high scores toward public review sites. differentiator

guest-loyalty-review-capture-routing

Square Feedback routes private customer feedback from digital receipts; score-based routing to public review sites is not documented.

Includes a native referral mechanic with per-guest codes or links, attribution of the referred guest's first order, and two-sided rewards.

guest-loyalty-referral-program

Square Loyalty's earning model is enumerated and contains no referral mechanic: an operator can 'customize your program type and purchase requirements to decide how customers can earn points. For example, you can have your customers earn points by the amount they spend, what items they purchase, or how often they visit', with rewards being 'a discount on the entire sale, a discount on a specific item or item category, a free item, or a combo'. Spend-, item-, category- and visit-based accrual, and nothing for introducing a new guest. The one referral programme Square operates runs in the opposite direction - it recruits sellers to Square, with the three tracks named on its own page as 'Square Seller', 'Business partner' and 'Affiliate' - and the OpenAPI spec's only use of the word is Square's own 'seller referral' as a free-processing scenario. No per-guest code or link, no first-order attribution, no two-sided guest reward. https://squareup.com/help/us/en/article/3952-create-a-loyalty-program-with-square · retrieved 2026-09-10

Issues an Apple Wallet or Google Wallet loyalty pass with push-updatable balance, as an alternative to requiring a branded app download. differentiator

guest-loyalty-wallet-pass

'Once a buyer taps the notification on their smartphone and verifies their personal information, they can add a digital loyalty pass for your business to their device,' and 'Digital loyalty pass details will reflect your business name and logo and the buyer's name, phone number, point balance, reward status, and start date.' No branded app download is involved. Shortfalls: 'This feature is only available for Apple Wallet on iOS devices at this time' - Google Wallet is not supported - and the article documents the pass as displaying the balance without describing a push-update mechanism, so 'push-updatable' is unconfirmed in first-party documentation. https://squareup.com/help/us/en/article/6469-enroll-to-square-loyalty-using-square-point-of-sale · retrieved 2026-08-06

Provides admin tooling to fulfill guest data access and deletion requests (CCPA/CPRA-style) including deletion propagation to loyalty and marketing records.

guest-loyalty-privacy-rights-tooling

A documented request channel exists: a seller 'can submit an access, deletion, or correction request by phone at 1-844-213-7377. You can also contact the Privacy Team via our portal,' after which 'we'll verify it by requesting that you confirm certain personal information associated with your account.' Buyers use profile.squareup.com or privacy.block.xyz for their own data. Shortfalls: there is no in-Dashboard access/deletion tool for a seller to fulfil a guest's request - it is a manual ticket to Square's privacy team - and the article states no propagation guarantee, only instructing the seller to 'delete the customer's personal information and direct any of your service providers that also maintain that information to delete it from their records', i.e. propagation to loyalty and marketing records is the seller's responsibility, not an automated behaviour. Square also notes it may retain transaction data as a regulated financial institution. https://squareup.com/help/us/en/article/6753-ccpa-faqs · retrieved 2026-08-06

Enforces loyalty fraud controls such as redemption velocity limits, manager approval on manual point adjustments, and flagging of employee self-redemption, with an audit log.

guest-loyalty-redemption-fraud-controls

Two of the claim's controls are partly present. Manual adjustments are permission-gated - only 'Account owners or team members with the loyalty permission to edit customer loyalty account information' can adjust - and the adjustment flow (Customers > Customer directory > customer > Loyalty > Manage > Adjust status) requires the operator to 'Click Add or Remove to enter a value and reason', so a reason is captured. Shortfalls: no redemption velocity or frequency limit, no manager-approval step on a manual adjustment (permission is a role, not an approval workflow), no flagging of employee self-redemption, and the article does not document an audit log or adjustment history view. Separately article 6130 covers voiding issued rewards and coupons. https://squareup.com/help/us/en/article/8407-update-customer-loyalty-profiles · retrieved 2026-08-06

Vendor documents AI/ML-generated recommendations for offer content, target audience, or send timing (claim-level; verify it is a shipped product feature, not a roadmap statement). differentiator

guest-loyalty-ai-offer-recommendation

Shipped, not roadmap, but only one of the claim's three branches and only at marketing grade. The Square AI page states it can 'Create professional content in seconds for item descriptions, marketing campaigns, team announcements, product images, and more' - AI-generated offer content. The Square AI help article (8516) confirms the assistant can 'Create and run email campaigns for promotions, items or announcements', which is execution rather than recommendation. Shortfalls: the content generator has no help-centre documentation of its own (this is a first-party marketing page, grade D), and neither source documents AI/ML-recommended target audiences or AI-recommended send timing, which are the other two branches of the claim. https://squareup.com/us/en/ai · retrieved 2026-08-06

Offers native stored-value/gift card balances tied to the same guest profile and redeemable across all locations of the brand.

guest-loyalty-stored-value-gift

Square Gift Cards are native stored value tied to the Square customer/loyalty ecosystem and redeemable across the seller's locations. https://squareup.com/help/us/en/article/7777-process-card-payments-with-offline-mode · retrieved 2026-08-01

Employees clock in and out at the POS terminal using a PIN, badge, or card, with no separate time-clock hardware required.

labor-clock-in-at-pos

Team members clock in and out at the Square POS; timecards feed Shifts and Payroll with no separate time clock hardware. https://squareup.com/help/us/en/article/6140-employee-timecard-reporting · retrieved 2026-08-01

Captures a photo at punch (or performs facial verification) attached to the timecard entry, with a photo-only mode available that stores no biometric template. differentiator

labor-photo-punch-verification

The clock-in authentication factor is a passcode and the enumerated settings contain no camera step. Square states the prerequisite plainly - 'assign each team member a personal passcode so they can clock in and out of the app' - and the clock in/out settings surface is enumerated in full: 'Clock in/out from Team app', 'Block early or unscheduled clock-ins' with an allow-within time limit, and 'Automatically clock out at end of shift' with an after time limit. No photo capture, facial verification or biometric option appears there or in the timecard-editing article. The vocabulary is present in the corpus but never in a time-clock sense: 'photo' occurs in 666 of 2,983 documents and 'selfie' in 5, and those are account identity verification, gift-card scanning, item photography in Square Photo Studio and bill capture in Bill Pay; 'biometric' occurs in 8, all privacy-policy, passkey or 3-D Secure text. https://squareup.com/help/us/en/article/8389-set-up-time-tracking · retrieved 2026-09-10 adversarially verified

Records time punches while the POS is offline and reconciles them on reconnect without loss or duplicate entries, with the behavior documented. differentiator

labor-offline-time-punch

OWNER RULING 2026-09-18 (Q7): labor-offline-time-punch ("...with the behavior documented") is a DOCUMENTATION-SHAPED claim, so a publication census that finds no documented offline time-punch behaviour carries `no`. Landed no/B on the census below. Retrieved 2026-09-18. PRIOR EVIDENCE: NEW SURFACE, NO MOVE: Square Seller Community (Khoros), read through its anonymous LiQL search API (community.squareup.com/api/2.0/search; robots names no Claude agent). 9 queries (offline clock / timecard / clocked / punch / shift / time card, internet clock in, no internet clock, clock in without internet) returned 6,531 unique messages, scanned with a sentence-proximity regex pairing clock-in/timecard/punch vocabulary with offline/no-internet vocabulary. The only on-point thread is ARCHIVED and old: "Clocking in/out without internet" (2017-06-02, merchant: "Can employees clock in/out in \"offline mode\" or without internet?"); reply 2017-06-04 by an Evangelist-rank merchant (not staff): "They can NOT clock in or out while in offline mode. Our internet was out for an hour on Monday and I have got a stack of paper time slips"; 2019-11-30 merchant feature request "we would like request that square allow timecard punching without internet access"; 2019-12-02 Square staff (nika, now Alumni) moved it to the feature-request thread: "I can definitely see how it would be useful to have the ability to clock in/clock in without internet access". This suggests offline punching was NOT supported in 2017-2019, but it is third-party/community evidence (grade D), 7-9 years stale, and not bounded to current docs, so it cannot carry a no; nothing post-2019 addresses it either way. Current squareup.com/help/us/en/article/7777 (offline payments) re-read: no timecard/clock-in mention. Retrieved 2026-09-17. || 330th: MERGE HOLD (proposed no/B, held unknown): Same cell, same shape as spoton in this session: a missing offline statement is not a capability `no`. The 111/111 staff-and-payroll topic census, the closed offline-payments restrictions list and the server-side-only Labor API are recorded as the bound; the Team app's local behaviour in an outage is never stated either way. If the owner rules that 'with the behavior documented' makes this a documentation-shaped claim, this row and spoton's both land no/B. PROPOSAL AS WRITTEN: NEW SURFACE, MOVES THE CELL (330th): Square's own PUBLISHER TOPIC MANIFEST for staff, fetched to 100%. squareup.com/help/us/en/topic/staff-and-payroll lists 111 article links; all 111/111 were fetched (curl, browser UA + Sec-Fetch headers, 8.7 MB, every one HTTP 200) and stripped to text. Tokenised, word-boundary, case-insensitive controls over that 111-document corpus: POSITIVE controls fire -- `timecards?` 18/111, `clock in` 8/111, `breaks?` 7/111, so the vocabulary is present and the extractor works. NEGATIVE controls: `offline` 1/111, `off-line` 0/111, `no internet` 0/111, `without internet` 0/111, `internet connection` 0/111, `connectivity` 0/111, `outage` 0/111, `disruption` 0/111, `reconnect` 0/111, `sync\w*` 3/111 (all three are Payroll-to-QuickBooks/benefits sync, not device sync). A sentence-level proximity scan pairing punch vocabulary (clock in/out, timecard, time card, punch, shift) with offline vocabulary returned 0 pairs in 111 articles. The single `offline` hit is 5062-sign-in-and-out-of-square-point-of-sale and is about PAYMENTS: "If you have pending offline payments, do not do any of the following actions: Sign out of the Square POS apps ... Pending offline payments will be permanently lost" -- nothing about punches. SECOND BOUND, the offline documentation set: squareup.com/help/us/en/article/7777 carries an explicit closed enumeration headed "Restrictions and unsupported features with offline payments" (hardware, payment types -- Afterpay, Cash App Pay, Square Gift Cards, Tap to Pay, manually-entered cards; "Square apps: Square Invoices app, Square Point of Sale app in services mode, Square Kiosk app"; "Square Loyalty"; "Reports: Close of day reporting"); timecards/clock-in appear nowhere in the enumeration, and the article's positive statement is payments-only: "The Square point of sale apps require an internet connection at all times to function optimally ... If your device goes offline, you can allow offline payments to accept cash and card payments". Two previously unread vendor PDFs linked from that article were downloaded and read: "Offline payments guide" (images.ctfassets.net/2d5q1td6cyxq/6YrMDTsiXCS5vHOdodnIRw/.../GTM00173_Square_Offline_Payments_Guid_USEN.pdf, 811 KB, "Last updated: Aug 1, 2025") -- its "During a disruption" list is "Keep selling, accepting both card payments and cash ... Print receipts", no clock-in/timecard line; and "Your reliability checklist" (assets.ctfassets.net/2d5q1td6cyxq/4hvBdmIzlbKxR7OAKrM4Iv/.../Reliability_Checklist_USEN.pdf, 1.83 MB) -- no clock-in/timecard line either. THIRD BOUND, the developer docs (developer.squareup.com/robots.txt names ClaudeBot but Allows /docs; only /reference/square_, /explorer/square_, /reference/sdks/web/payments_, /reference/square/webhooks-api, /online-payments-how-to, /snippets-api, /flutter are barred): docs/labor-api/{what-it-does,how-it-works,troubleshooting} and docs/pos-api/cookbook/offline-mode were read in full. The Labor API is a server-side REST/GraphQL API (CreateTimecard/UpdateTimecard/SearchTimecards) whose only stated limitations are API version 2025-05-21+, wage configuration and one open timecard per team member; it documents no local store, no offline queue and no reconciliation, and the only offline cookbook Square publishes is for PAYMENTS ("Learn how to continue processing payments offline", Bluetooth + reader requirements, client_transaction_id). VERDICT: `no`. The claim's conjunct "with the behavior documented" fails outright against a 100% publisher topic manifest plus Square's complete published offline documentation set: Square documents exactly which functions survive an outage, and time punching is not among them. Corroborating (grade D, not load-bearing): the 2017-2019 Square Seller Community threads recorded in the prior note. DENOMINATORS: 111/111 staff-and-payroll articles, 1 offline help article + 2 vendor PDFs, 4 developer doc pages. POISON CHECKED: `offline` was matched word-boundary so it does not pick up `offline_payments` prose only via substring; `shift` is a homonym (ScheduledShift/deprecated Shift object) and was kept only on the punch side of the proximity test. NOT COVERED: non-US locales of the help centre and the Square Team mobile app's in-app copy. Retrieved 2026-09-18. https://squareup.com/help/us/en/topic/staff-and-payroll · retrieved 2026-09-18 adversarially verified

Permissions are grantable per discrete action (void, comp, discount, refund, drawer open, price change, report access) per role and per location, not limited to fixed cashier/manager/admin tiers.

labor-granular-rbac

Square Advanced Access provides 'multiple levels of access across all Square products with unlimited custom permission sets so you can delegate responsibilities and control what your team can see and do, such as issue refunds or edit orders', with per-team-member passcodes optionally paired to badges. Price re-verified against the live page: 'Included with Square Plus ($49/mo. per location) or Square Premium ($149/mo. per location)', so no separate add-on charge. Individual-action granularity is corroborated by the discrete gates in the product documentation - a per-discount 'Require a passcode' toggle (article 3955) and a passcode or permission requirement to act on another team member's check (article 8166). https://squareup.com/us/en/staff/advanced-access · retrieved 2026-08-09

Manager overrides and approvals are attributed to the individual approver and written to an immutable audit trail queryable after the fact.

labor-manager-override-audit

Individual attribution IS documented, contrary to the earlier note: 'With Advanced Access, you get advanced team member level reporting... You can monitor actions taken by individual team members through the Activity Log, such as refunds, discounts, and voided transactions.' Badges paired to personal passcodes give 'faster logins, clock ins, and overrides with just one tap', so overrides are tied to an identified person. Shortfalls: the log attributes the actor, not a separate approving manager - no override-approval record naming an approver distinct from the acting user is documented; and nothing states the log is immutable, tamper-evident or retention-bounded. https://squareup.com/us/en/staff/advanced-access · retrieved 2026-08-09

Builds and publishes employee shift schedules inside the same platform that holds the timekeeping data, rather than requiring a third-party scheduling app. differentiator

labor-native-scheduling

Support-centre article documents Staff > Scheduling > Schedule in Square Dashboard: select + on a team member's row to open Add shift, set Start Time/End Time with a Repeat shift drop-down, Save, then Publish; the publish summary shows total team members scheduled, shift count and hour count, and offers 'Notify only affected team members' or 'Notify all team members', with team members receiving the schedule by email and in the Square Team app. Scheduling ships in Square Shifts, the same module that records timecards (article 8392). https://squareup.com/help/us/en/article/7155-scheduling-with-team-management · retrieved 2026-08-06

Generates recommended staffing levels or labor hours by daypart from the operator's own POS sales history, not just a static template. differentiator

labor-demand-labor-forecast

Partial, delivered only by Managerbot and only in open beta. The help article lists scheduling among Managerbot's tasks as 'Analyze staffing and labor costs, and draft team schedules with the right coverage', and the drafts are proposals - Managerbot 'can take on routine workflows from start to finish with your edits and approval'. The demand-driven part of the claim rests on Square's announcement rather than its documentation: the open-beta press release says 'Managerbot drafts optimized schedules based on projected sales volume, team availability, and the seller's own staffing requirements.' Shortfalls: that sales-projection wording appears nowhere in the help centre, which describes only coverage; no staffing recommendation is expressed as hours by daypart; Managerbot is an LLM agent Square warns 'can make mistakes', is restricted to owners and full-access team members, and is offered to 'most non-franchise food & beverage, retail, and health & beauty US sellers', excluding franchise operators. Square's own Labor API frames forecasting as what third-party scheduling applications do with Square's data. https://squareup.com/help/us/en/article/8617-use-managerbot-to-manage-business-tasks-and-insights · retrieved 2026-09-10

Displays labor cost as a percentage of sales in real time during service on a manager view or POS, not only in end-of-day or next-morning reports. differentiator

labor-realtime-labor-percent

Total labor cost for a date range with break and overtime tracking against labor-cost limits; live labor-as-percent-of-sales during service is not documented. https://squareup.com/help/us/en/article/6140-employee-timecard-reporting · retrieved 2026-08-01

Warns or blocks at clock-in when an employee is approaching or would cross a configured overtime threshold, before the overtime is incurred. differentiator

labor-overtime-prevention

Overtime rules and tracking exist to avoid exceeding labor-cost limits; a block or warning at clock-in before OT is incurred is not documented. https://squareup.com/us/en/staff/shifts/features · retrieved 2026-08-01

Configures meal and rest break rules per state or jurisdiction, prompts required break attestation, and flags missed breaks for premium pay. differentiator

labor-break-compliance-by-state

Break tracking and work-period/overtime rule configuration exist; per-state meal/rest rule templates, attestation prompts and missed-break premium flagging are not documented. https://squareup.com/us/en/staff/shifts/features · retrieved 2026-08-01

Enforces minor-labor restrictions (age-based maximum hours, prohibited time windows, school-day limits) at both scheduling and clock-in.

labor-minor-labor-rules

Square disclaims it directly: 'The default meal break settings are based on our understanding of the generally applicable state requirements as of September 1, 2025. These defaults do not account for industry-specific rules, including but not limited to child labor laws.' The adjoining labor-rules settings screen (article 8390) is enumerated in full - start of workweek, workday hours, and toggles for daily overtime, weekly overtime, daily double time and 7th-day overtime, each with an 'After Working (hours)' threshold - and contains no age band, no prohibited time window, no school-day limit and no minor classification on a team member. So neither the scheduling side nor the clock-in side enforces minor-labor restrictions. https://squareup.com/help/us/en/article/8391-set-up-breaks · retrieved 2026-08-06

Computes tip pooling and tip-outs automatically per shift from configurable rules (percentage of sales, hours worked, points, or role), rather than requiring a manual spreadsheet.

labor-tip-pooling-rules

Tip pooling by user-defined percentage, split daily or weekly among tip-eligible jobs, allocated within a job by hours worked. Shifts Plus feature. https://squareup.com/help/us/en/article/7654-get-started-with-tip-pooling-for-team-management · retrieved 2026-08-01

Retains a per-shift, per-employee record of tips received, amounts contributed to the pool, and amounts distributed from the pool, exportable for audit.

labor-tip-distribution-audit-trail

Timecard and tip reporting is exportable per team member; a per-shift record of contributed-vs-distributed pool amounts as a distinct audit artifact is not documented. https://squareup.com/help/us/en/article/6140-employee-timecard-reporting · retrieved 2026-08-01

Payroll export separates cash from charged qualified tips and carries a Treasury tipped-occupation code, supporting the W-2 Box 12 code TP and Box 14b reporting required for tax year 2026. differentiator

labor-qualified-tips-w2-reporting

Partial: the cash-versus-charged split exists, the tax-year-2026 qualified-tips apparatus does not appear anywhere. Square Payroll imports charged tips from timecards and takes declared cash tips separately - at payroll run an operator selects 'Import time and wages' where they have 'enabled tip importing or commission tracking, or if you require your team to declare cash tips when clocking out or switching jobs' - and tips reach the W-2 at 'Box 7: Social Security Tips - Total calendar year employee tips reported.' The shortfall is the rest of the claim: Square's Box 12 explainer runs D, E, G, S, W, AA, BB, DD and EE with no code TP, and Box 14 is described generically as 'Other - Employers may use this box to report information such as state disability insurance taxes withheld', with no 14b tipped-occupation entry. The phrases `qualified tip`, `tipped occupation` and `no tax on tips`, and the standalone token 'TP', all read zero across 2,983 documents. Square Payroll is a separately priced add-on. https://squareup.com/help/us/en/article/5445-understanding-and-distributing-your-w-2s · retrieved 2026-09-10

Vendor processes payroll itself as a first-party product (tax filing and direct deposit), as opposed to exporting to a third-party payroll provider only. differentiator

labor-native-payroll

Setup documentation requires the employer to authorize Square Payroll as Reporting Agent and grant Power of Attorney where the state requires it, which 'authorizes us to pay and file taxes on your behalf'; a bank account is linked via Plaid instant verification or manual entry, and is required for tax debits as well as direct-deposit debits from Square Balance. Square warns it 'may be unable to make tax payments or filings' if employer details do not match IRS/state agency records. Companion article 5683 documents Square filing federal Form 941 or 944 on the employer's filing frequency. https://squareup.com/help/us/en/article/5605-sign-up-for-square-payroll · retrieved 2026-08-06

Exports timecards, wages, and tips in documented formats or via direct integration for at least two major payroll providers (e.g. Gusto, ADP, Paychex, QuickBooks).

labor-payroll-export-formats

Square Payroll is native and a QuickBooks Online sync is documented. Direct integrations with two named third-party payroll providers were not verified. https://squareup.com/help/us/en/topic/staff-and-payroll · retrieved 2026-08-01

Employees can request shift swaps or claim open shifts in a self-service app, subject to a manager approval workflow that enforces overtime and role eligibility. differentiator

labor-shift-swap-workflow

Partial - the approval workflow is documented but overtime is not enforced within it. Documented: team members request a shift trade or a shift cover from the Square Team App under Shifts > Schedule; the counterparty gets an email/push notification and can accept or decline; an open shift 'becomes visible to any team member with a matching job title not already scheduled to work during that specific timeframe', so role eligibility and double-booking are enforced; managers approve or decline the requests from Square Dashboard (Staff > Scheduling > Schedule > ... > Requests) or the Team app. Named shortfalls: (1) overtime appears only as an alert type alongside break and shift violations, with no documented rule preventing an approved swap from creating overtime; (2) shift swapping is restricted to the paid Square Shifts Plus / Team Plus subscription, not the base plan. https://squareup.com/help/us/en/article/8394-manage-your-schedule-for-team-members · retrieved 2026-08-06

Reports per-employee sales performance metrics (average check, items or category attachment rate, void and comp rate) by server or cashier. differentiator

labor-server-performance-metrics

Per-employee sales reporting exists: 'Track and monitor your team's performance with team member activity log and team sales report,' and 'With Team sales report, you can run team member level reporting to see how much your team is selling.' The Activity Log separately records per-person refunds, discounts and voided transactions, which is the closest thing to a void/comp rate. Shortfalls: the reported metric is sales volume per team member; average check, items or category attachment rate, and a computed void/comp rate per server are not documented as reported metrics anywhere on this page or in the restaurants help articles. https://squareup.com/us/en/staff/advanced-access · retrieved 2026-08-09

Supports multi-level recipe/BOM costing where a recipe can contain sub-recipes (prep items) and plate cost recalculates automatically when any component ingredient's cost changes.

inventory-recipe-bom-costing

Square Recipes (beta) builds recipes from ingredients and recalculates COGS from ingredient unit costs. Sub-recipes / multi-level prep items are not documented natively; MarketMan add-on covers deeper recipe management. https://squareup.com/help/us/en/article/8629-beta-track-ingredient-costs-with-square-recipes · retrieved 2026-08-01

Stores purchase unit, recipe unit, and count unit per item with explicit conversion factors, plus a yield/waste percentage applied to raw-to-usable conversion.

inventory-unit-conversion-yields

Square Recipes (beta; Square for Restaurants Plus/Premium) gives each ingredient a unit chosen at creation - the article names ounces, pounds and litres - and supports more than one: 'If you plan to receive or use this ingredient in more than one unit, select Sell by multiple units', which is where stock conversion and sell-by units are set up. Recipes then attach ingredients to menu items and decrement ingredient stock on sale. Shortfalls: no yield or waste percentage field exists anywhere in the ingredient or recipe setup, so raw-to-usable conversion cannot be modelled; and the article defines a stock unit and sell-by units rather than three distinct purchase / recipe / count unit roles each with an explicit conversion factor. https://squareup.com/help/us/en/article/8629-beta-track-ingredient-costs-with-square-recipes · retrieved 2026-08-06

Produces a theoretical-vs-actual usage variance report per item for a defined count period, showing theoretical usage from POS sales times recipe, actual usage from counts plus receipts, and the variance in both units and currency. differentiator

inventory-theoretical-vs-actual

Delivered only by the paid add-on: Square Restaurant Inventory by MarketMan 'pulls sales data to calculate theoretical usage, track variances, and update recipe costs' at $99/mo/location on Plus or Premium. https://squareup.com/us/en/press/square-restaurant-inventory-marketman · retrieved 2026-08-01

Depletes ingredient on-hand quantities in near real time as orders are fired at the POS, including depletion driven by modifier selections, not only in an end-of-day batch. differentiator

inventory-realtime-depletion

It IS stated, and the answer is no: 'Modifiers don't track inventory or costs.' Depletion also cannot cover multi-variation (sized) items at all, and the whole feature is beta on Plus/Premium. Real-time ingredient depletion exists only for single-variation prepared-food items with no modifier contribution — partial, not yes. https://squareup.com/help/us/en/article/8629-beta-track-ingredient-costs-with-square-recipes · retrieved 2026-08-01 adversarially verified

Automatically 86s (marks unavailable) menu items on the POS, online ordering, and connected third-party delivery menus when a component ingredient hits zero or a configured threshold. differentiator

inventory-86-auto-sync

Contradicted by the very Recipes article the researcher cited elsewhere: 'If any tracked ingredient in a recipe runs out of stock, the menu item is automatically marked as sold out.' Combined with the documented availability sync to Square Online / DoorDash / Uber Eats, ingredient-driven auto-86 with channel propagation is documented. (Still beta and Plus/Premium-gated.) https://squareup.com/help/us/en/article/8629-beta-track-ingredient-costs-with-square-recipes · retrieved 2026-08-01 adversarially verified

Supports full physical inventory, ad-hoc spot counts of a subset, and scheduled recurring cycle counts, with each count's variance recorded as separate history rather than overwriting prior counts.

inventory-count-modes

Counting is documented as two ad-hoc operations from Dashboard or the POS Inventory applet: 'Receive stock for new deliveries, or Adjust stock for count corrections'. History is retained per adjustment and is now reason-coded - the 2026-07-02 release note adds built-in adjustment reasons (Spoilage, Samples/Promo, Internal Use, Vendor Return, Production Waste) plus seller-created custom reasons, managed on an Adjustment Reasons settings page, and 'Inventory History is filterable by reason, so sellers can isolate specific causes of stock loss across items and time periods' (all sellers with inventory tracking, Free tier and above, on Square POS iOS/Android and Dashboard). Shortfalls: no distinct full physical inventory mode, no spot-count-of-a-subset mode, no scheduled recurring cycle counts, and no count session that records its own variance against expected on-hand - the retained history is of individual adjustments, not of counts. https://squareup.com/help/us/en/article/8629-beta-track-ingredient-costs-with-square-recipes · retrieved 2026-08-06

Provides a mobile/tablet counting app supporting barcode or QR scanning that continues to accept counts with no network connectivity and syncs on reconnect.

inventory-mobile-count-offline

Partial: the scanning mobile count is documented in full, its offline behaviour is documented nowhere. Counting runs in the POS app - 'Full and cycle counting are available on iOS and Android devices, including Square Register, Square Terminal, and Square Handheld' - in both modes, a full count where 'any uncounted stock is set to zero' and a cycle count where 'Items not included in a cycle count are unaffected'. Capture is manual or scanned: 'Use a compatible barcode scanner or the built-in camera on your device to scan the item.' Counts may be taken in any configured unit and are converted automatically to the stock-by unit. The shortfall is connectivity: no article states whether counts can be entered without a network or how they reconcile on reconnect, and Square's offline documentation is scoped to payment capture and lists inventory counting on neither its supported nor its unsupported side. Square Plus and Premium subscribers. https://squareup.com/help/us/en/article/8249-conduct-full-inventory-counts-with-square-for-retail · retrieved 2026-09-10

Ships pre-built electronic vendor catalog and order-transmission integrations with named broadline distributors (e.g. Sysco, US Foods, Performance Food Group) that send purchase orders and receive invoices electronically rather than by emailed PDF. differentiator

inventory-vendor-catalogs-edi

Partial: the named broadline distributors are real, the electronic order-and-invoice link is not. Square Order Guide ships dedicated importers for eight of them - 'We have specific importers for several vendors, including Sysco, US Foods, Performance Foodservice, Gordon Food Service, Ben E. Keith, Shamrock, Saladino's, and Baldor. We'll be adding more vendor-specific importers over time.' But the mechanism is a file the operator fetches themselves: 'Exports (CSV/XLSX) from any vendor's online portal can be imported into the Order Guide', and Square suggests the operator pull them: 'We suggest exporting prices directly from your vendor's portal.'. Nothing is transmitted to the distributor, and invoices are excluded outright - 'Do not include invoices.' Square says purchase-order construction has not shipped: 'In the future Order Guide will support the ability to build a purchase order directly from Square.' The guide caps at 750 items. The token `EDI` reads zero corpus-wide once tokenised. Restaurants Plus/Premium. https://squareup.com/help/us/en/article/8573-compare-ingredient-prices-with-square-order-guide · retrieved 2026-09-10

Ingests supplier invoices from photo, PDF, or email and extracts line-item detail (item, quantity, unit, price) into the inventory ledger without manual line entry. differentiator

inventory-invoice-ocr

Add-on only: MarketMan lets you 'snap a photo of invoices to automatically update inventory and costs'. Not native to the base POS. https://squareup.com/us/en/press/square-restaurant-inventory-marketman · retrieved 2026-08-01

Tracks per-item purchase price history across invoices and alerts when a received price exceeds the prior or contracted price by a configurable threshold. differentiator

inventory-price-change-alerts

Add-on only: MarketMan provides automatic vendor price comparisons and supplier price history. Threshold-based alerting is not explicitly documented. https://squareup.com/us/en/press/square-restaurant-inventory-marketman · retrieved 2026-08-01

Maintains par levels per item per location and generates suggested purchase order quantities from on-hand versus par, with at least one mode driven by a sales forecast rather than a static par. differentiator

inventory-par-auto-suggest

Add-on only: MarketMan generates orders based on par levels and real-time usage. A forecast-driven par mode is not documented. https://squareup.com/us/en/press/square-restaurant-inventory-marketman · retrieved 2026-08-01

Provides a structured waste/spoilage logging workflow with reason codes that debits inventory and reports waste cost separately from usage variance.

inventory-waste-logging

Add-on only: MarketMan monitors waste and identifies loss trends. Native structured waste logging with reason codes in the base POS is not documented. https://squareup.com/us/en/press/square-restaurant-inventory-marketman · retrieved 2026-08-01

Tracks expiration or use-by dates on received and prepped items and surfaces an expiring-soon report or alert before spoilage.

inventory-shelf-life-expiry

Square measures how long stock has been held, never when it expires. The aging inventory report enumerates its own metrics - 'Average age of inventory', 'Last Received Date', 'Age Segmentation: Displays the quantity of items in stock within the last 30, 60, 90, 120 days, and beyond', and total on-hand quantity and value - all derived from receipt date, with no expiration or use-by field anywhere. Spoilage exists only after the fact, as a stock-adjustment reason: the Inventory API enumerates SPOILAGE_WASTE as a DECREASE alongside DAMAGED, THEFT, LOST and PRODUCTION_WASTE. The vocabulary the claim turns on is absent - `shelf life`, `shelf-life`, `use-by`, `expiring soon` and `best before` each read zero across 2,983 documents - while the control term 'expiration date' occurs in 61 of them and is, in every case, loyalty-point expiry or a payment card's expiry. No expiring-soon report or alert exists. https://squareup.com/help/us/en/article/8265-track-aging-inventory-with-square-for-retail · retrieved 2026-09-10

Supports partial-bottle liquid inventory by weight (scale integration) or by bottle fraction for bar and beverage counting.

inventory-bar-partial-bottle

Square supports fractional-bottle beverage inventory through stock conversion, and uses exactly this case to explain it: the feature lets an operator 'manage inventory and sell items by different units of measure and fractional quantities. For example, if your business sells wine by the bottle and by the glass, you can track all of your inventory on a single item variation so that whether you sell it by the bottle or by the glass, the inventory is reduced.' The operator defines the unit and the ratio - 'a conversion for a bottle of wine might be "4 glasses are equal to 1 bottle"' - and custom units carry 'a name, abbreviation, and precision'. Counting honours it: 'Count inventory in any configured unit during full or cycle inventory counts. The system automatically converts quantities between units based on your conversion settings.' Available in bar mode, on Square for Restaurants Plus/Premium or Square for Retail Plus/Premium. Satisfied on the bottle-fraction branch; weight-based counting via a scale is not - Square's scale integration prices items by weight at checkout and is not an inventory-counting input. https://squareup.com/help/us/en/article/7237-stock-conversion-sell-by · retrieved 2026-09-10

Exports period COGS and accounts-payable invoice detail in a named accounting system's import format (e.g. QuickBooks, Sage Intacct, NetSuite) with GL account mapping configurable per item category.

inventory-cogs-gl-export

Period COGS exists natively: 'When a menu item with a recipe is sold, Square decrements ingredient stock and calculates cost of goods sold (COGS) and profit margins based on your ingredient unit costs', surfaced at Square Dashboard > Reports > Inventory reports > Cost of goods sold with columns for quantity sold, COGS, total revenue, profit and profit margin (Square for Restaurants Plus/Premium, beta). Shortfalls: Square Recipes has no supplier-invoice or accounts-payable capture at all, so AP invoice detail cannot be exported; the article documents no export into a named accounting system's import format and no GL account mapping, per item category or otherwise. Accounting sync is delivered by third-party App Marketplace connectors (QuickBooks Online via Amaka, Commerce Sync, Synder) rather than by a first-party export, and per-category GL mapping is a property of those apps, not of Square. https://squareup.com/help/us/en/article/8629-beta-track-ingredient-costs-with-square-recipes · retrieved 2026-08-06

Inventory and recipe costing are delivered natively by the POS vendor rather than requiring a separately-contracted third-party product (e.g. MarginEdge, MarketMan, Restaurant365) to function. differentiator

inventory-native-not-partner

The honest read: light recipe costing is native (Square Recipes, beta), but real restaurant inventory — purchasing, variance, invoices, waste — is Square Restaurant Inventory by MarketMan, a $99/mo/location partner-powered add-on. https://squareup.com/us/en/inventory-management/restaurants · retrieved 2026-08-01

Joins recipe cost to actual item sales mix to report contribution margin per menu item, and flags items whose margin fell below a configured threshold after ingredient cost changes. differentiator

inventory-menu-margin-linkage

Square Recipes computes COGS and profit margins per item from ingredient unit costs. Threshold-based flagging when margin falls after a cost change is not documented. https://squareup.com/help/us/en/article/8629-beta-track-ingredient-costs-with-square-recipes · retrieved 2026-08-01

Provides a live sales dashboard reflecting transactions within minutes of the sale, accessible from both a browser and a mobile app off-premise.

reporting-realtime-dashboard

Square Dashboard app provides mobile back-office with real-time alerts, plus browser Dashboard. https://squareup.com/us/en/press/releases-food-and-beverage · retrieved 2026-08-01

Generates a daily close-out/EOD report reconciling gross sales, net sales, tax, tips, discounts, refunds, tender types, and expected cash deposit in one document.

reporting-eod-closeout

A close-of-day report exists — it is named in the offline documentation as one of the features unavailable while offline. https://squareup.com/help/us/en/article/7777-process-card-payments-with-offline-mode · retrieved 2026-08-01

Provides a product mix (PMIX) report at individual menu item AND modifier level with quantity, gross and net sales, filterable by daypart and revenue center.

reporting-pmix-modifier-level

Item sales reporting exists across all Square plans; explicit modifier-level PMIX with net sales filterable by daypart and revenue center is not documented.

Produces an audit report of comps, voids, discounts, and price overrides attributed to the employee who applied them and the manager who approved them, with reason codes and timestamps.

reporting-comps-voids-audit

Reasons are captured at the moment of the action ('Select a reason for comp and tap Comp'; 'Select a reason for void and tap Void'), and comps are reported: 'A comped item will show in sales reports as well as inventory reporting.' Attribution to the acting individual is documented on the Advanced Access page: 'You can monitor actions taken by individual team members through the Activity Log, such as refunds, discounts, and voided transactions.' Shortfalls: those are two separate surfaces, not one exception report joining employee, reason and timestamp; price overrides are not named in either; and nothing documents recording a separate approving manager alongside the employee who applied the comp or void. https://squareup.com/help/us/en/article/8166-comp-void-and-reassign-checks-with-square-for-restaurants · retrieved 2026-08-09

Reports cash over/short per drawer, per shift, and per employee, comparing counted cash to expected cash from tendered transactions and paid-outs.

reporting-cash-over-short

Square cash drawer reports are long-standing across the POS line but I could not verify a current documentation URL for per-shift, per-employee over/short in this pass.

Reports sales per labor hour and labor cost as a percentage of sales by hour, by department, and by employee, using actual clocked hours from the POS time clock.

reporting-labor-productivity

Timecard and labor cost reporting uses actual clocked hours. Sales per labor hour and labor percent by hour/department/employee are not documented as named reports. https://squareup.com/help/us/en/article/6140-employee-timecard-reporting · retrieved 2026-08-01

Reports per-server metrics including average check, items per check, attachment rate for named categories, and tips as a percentage of sales. differentiator

reporting-server-scorecards

Team sales report is included with Advanced Access and is described only as sales volume by person: 'With Team sales report, you can run team member level reporting to see how much your team is selling.' Shortfall: the specific scorecard metric set the claim names - average check, items per check, attachment rate for named categories, and tips as a percentage of sales - is not enumerated on the product page or in the restaurants help centre. Tip data is captured (tips are included in the amount processing fees are taken from) but no per-server tip-percentage report is documented. https://squareup.com/us/en/staff/advanced-access · retrieved 2026-08-09

Reports revenue and margin by fulfillment channel — dine-in, direct online, first-party delivery, and each third-party marketplace separately — net of marketplace commission fees. differentiator

reporting-channel-profitability

Channel dimensioning is documented: on the Sales Summary report 'You can select one grouping by none, location, device, device nickname, source, channel, or collected by' and 'You can apply one or more filters to narrow the focus of your report. Choose between timeframe, channel, device, device nickname, source, or collected by.' A 'Third-party fees' metric exists. Shortfalls: the article does not enumerate the channel values, so separate lines for dine-in, direct online, first-party delivery and each marketplace are unverified; and no report is documented that nets marketplace commission out of channel revenue or reports margin by channel - third-party fees appear as their own metric rather than as a deduction against channel sales. https://squareup.com/help/us/en/article/5381-in-app-summaries-and-reports · retrieved 2026-08-06

Supports scheduling any report for automatic recurring delivery by email or to a shared destination on a defined cadence and recipient list.

reporting-scheduled-delivery

Recurring emailed reporting exists but only in canned form: the configurable notification types are 'Account emails, like daily or monthly sales summaries', 'Product or feature emails, for notifications about low inventory or Square Loans payments' and 'Transactional emails for payments, refunds, or transfers', and article 5072 confirms the operator can 'configure email notifications for your daily sales summary as well as your monthly and annual sales summary'. Shortfalls: no arbitrary report can be scheduled - only the sales summary; cadence is limited to the daily/monthly/annual presets rather than a defined schedule; and recipients are not a list - notifications go 'to the email address of full access team members by default' and 'Transactional notifications can't be sent to multiple email addresses'. Only account owners can configure them. No shared-destination (SFTP, drive, webhook) delivery is documented. https://squareup.com/help/us/en/article/3843-email-notifications-from-square · retrieved 2026-08-06

Publishes a documented public REST or GraphQL API covering orders, payments, menu, and labor data, with self-service developer credentials obtainable without a signed partner agreement. differentiator

reporting-public-api

Public REST and GraphQL APIs covering orders, payments, catalog, customers, inventory and labor, with self-serve credentials and no partner agreement. https://developer.squareup.com/reference/square · retrieved 2026-08-01

Emits outbound webhooks for order and payment lifecycle events to a customer-supplied endpoint, with documented retry behavior and payload signature verification. differentiator

reporting-webhooks

HMAC-SHA-256-signed webhooks with 11-attempt exponential backoff over 24 hours plus Events API replay. https://developer.squareup.com/docs/webhooks/overview · retrieved 2026-08-01

API and raw-data access are included in the standard subscription rather than gated behind an additional per-location fee, revenue share, or enterprise-only contract. differentiator

reporting-api-not-upcharged

Developer account, sandbox and API access are free and self-serve; no per-location API fee or plan gate is published. https://developer.squareup.com/docs/build-basics/general-considerations/using-rest-api · retrieved 2026-08-01

Core reporting beyond basic sales summaries — labor vs sales, PMIX, comps/voids audit, multi-location comparison — is available on the entry-level paid plan rather than requiring a higher tier or an add-on analytics SKU. differentiator

reporting-tier-paywall

Advanced reporting is called out as a Square Premium ($149/mo) capability, so the deeper reporting set is not on the entry-level paid plan. Basic sales reporting is on Free. https://squareup.com/us/en/press/unified-pricing-and-packaging · retrieved 2026-08-01

Documents a historical retention window of at least 24 months of transaction-level detail queryable in the reporting UI, with no silent truncation or archive retrieval fee. differentiator

reporting-history-retention

No retention window is documented for the reporting UI, which is what this claim asks for. Every reporting article describes an unbounded picker and states no limit - custom reports say only 'use the date-selector to specify the date range to view your data', and the sales summary, transaction status, cash drawer and deposit articles all repeat the same date-selector instruction with no floor, ceiling or truncation notice. Square's privacy notice declines to give a figure at all: 'The retention periods for your information are determined on a case-by-case basis'. The only retention numbers Square publishes anywhere in the corpus govern a different surface - 'The Square Developer Console shows data for 1 year', with API logs kept 28 days So there is no documented commitment of at least 24 months of transaction-level detail; the claim is about what the vendor documents, and Square documents nothing. This is a no about the documentation, not an assertion that older data is purged. https://squareup.com/help/us/en/article/6104-creating-custom-reports-in-the-online-dashboard · retrieved 2026-09-10

Sends proactive push or email alerts when an operator-configured metric breaches a threshold or deviates from its historical pattern (e.g. void spike, sales below forecast, discount rate anomaly). differentiator

reporting-anomaly-alerts

The Square Dashboard app is marketed with 'real-time alerts'; operator-configurable metric thresholds and pattern-deviation detection are not documented. https://squareup.com/us/en/press/releases-food-and-beverage · retrieved 2026-08-01

Offers a natural-language query or AI assistant that answers ad-hoc questions against the operator's own sales and labor data and returns a figure or chart, not a generic help-article response.

reporting-nl-query

RE-POINTED 2026-08-10; value and grade unchanged. The cited article 8516 'Use Ask AI to get insights about your business' NO LONGER EXISTS: Square retired the id and 301s it onto article 8617, a DIFFERENT article about a RENAMED product, which resolves 200 with a real title so no status, size or title test could see the substitution. Square AI is now Managerbot, 'an artificial intelligence (AI) business partner that proactively surfaces important insights and suggestions about your business'. The natural-language query surface the claim turns on is intact and the load-bearing quotation survives verbatim on the successor: 'Business snapshot: Quickly pull up a view of key performance metrics across sales, orders, items, and customer trends', alongside 'Data exploration: Go deeper into your data by answering questions about business performance, like filtering and breaking down results by time period, location, channel, items, or customers', and it now also drafts schedules, receives inventory, runs email campaigns and bulk-updates catalogues. Availability is unchanged - 'Account owners or team members with full access permissions'. WITHDRAWN with the old article, because none of it appears on the successor: the example prompt 'What were my net sales by day of the week as a bar chart', the answer-as-table-or-chart framing, chart-type follow-ups, pin-to-auto-update, CSV download, and the open-beta caveat. The successor's own hedge replaces the last of those: 'Managerbot currently supports certain data and workflows and can't answer every question or take on every type of action within your Square account', and it is Dashboard-only - not available on Square POS apps or devices. https://squareup.com/help/us/en/article/8617-use-managerbot-to-manage-business-tasks-and-insights · retrieved 2026-08-10

Reports guest-level analytics including new versus returning guest counts, visit frequency, and lifetime spend cohorts tied to identifiable guest records from loyalty or online ordering. differentiator

reporting-guest-cohorts

Loyalty metrics reporting exists and customer records are identifiable; new-vs-returning counts, visit frequency and lifetime spend cohorts are not documented as a report. https://squareup.com/help/us/en/article/6467-view-your-square-loyalty-metrics · retrieved 2026-08-01

Produces a forward sales forecast at daypart or hourly granularity from the location's own history, exposed in the reporting UI and consumable by scheduling or ordering workflows. differentiator

reporting-sales-forecast

Nothing forward-looking is exposed in Square's reporting. Managerbot, the nearest thing, is explicitly retrospective and real-time: 'The Pulse tab gives you a real-time snapshot of your business performance', its Ideas 'Highlight data-driven signals about your business that may need attention and suggest next steps', and its data exploration answers questions 'about business performance, like filtering and breaking down results by time period, location, channel, items, or customers'. No forecast appears among its enumerated capabilities. Where a projection is mentioned at all it is an internal input to a different workflow and is never surfaced as a report - Square's announcement says Managerbot 'drafts optimized schedules based on projected sales volume', with the projection consumed by scheduling rather than displayed. The reporting articles enumerate sales summary, item/category/modifier, discounts-comp-void, tax-fee-service-charge, dispute, cash drawer, shift and close-of-day reports; none is a forecast, at any granularity. https://squareup.com/help/us/en/article/8617-use-managerbot-to-manage-business-tasks-and-insights · retrieved 2026-09-10

Generates payroll- and tax-ready tip reporting: declared versus charged tips per employee, tip pool distribution detail, and a tax liability summary by jurisdiction.

reporting-tip-tax-compliance

Tip pooling produces per-employee allocations feeding Square Payroll, and cash tip tracking exists in Shifts Plus. Declared-vs-charged tips and a jurisdiction tax liability summary are not documented. https://squareup.com/help/us/en/article/7654-get-started-with-tip-pooling-for-team-management · retrieved 2026-08-01

Supports a named organizational hierarchy of at least three levels (e.g. enterprise > region/group > location) as a first-class object that reporting and permissions can be scoped to, not just a flat list of locations.

multi-location-org-hierarchy

Locations are first-class and Square for Franchises adds a corporate level above them; a named three-level enterprise > region > location object that reporting and permissions scope to is not documented. https://squareup.com/us/en/franchises · retrieved 2026-08-01

A corporate-level menu can be authored once and published to a chosen set of locations in a single action, with a publish/version history showing what was pushed, when, and by whom.

multi-location-central-menu-publish

Square for Franchises is described as a central hub controlling what franchisees can change. A one-action publish to a chosen set of locations with publish/version history is not documented. https://squareup.com/us/en/franchises · retrieved 2026-08-01

Supports price tiers/zones so one menu item carries different prices per location group, per order channel, and per daypart without duplicating the item record.

multi-location-price-zones

Per-location price variation is supported via the catalog's location-scoped pricing. Price tiers by location GROUP, by channel and by daypart on one item record are not documented. https://developer.squareup.com/docs/catalog-api/what-it-does · retrieved 2026-08-01

Provides above-store reporting that aggregates sales, labor, discounts, voids, and item mix across any selected set of locations in one view, with store-vs-store ranking and variance flags.

multi-location-consolidated-reporting

I could not find consolidated above-store reporting described anywhere in the fetched content of the franchises page beyond the page's own framing; there is no quote supporting it and no help-center documentation for Square for Franchises reporting. Cross-location reporting in the standard Dashboard is real, but the claim as scored (franchise-level consolidated reporting) rests on a sales page. https://squareup.com/us/en/franchises · retrieved 2026-08-01 adversarially verified

Gift cards issued at one location are redeemable at any other location in the brand, with a reported outstanding-liability balance and inter-store settlement/redemption reconciliation between owners.

multi-location-cross-location-giftcard

Correct conclusion, wrong evidence: the offline-payments article only establishes that Square Gift Cards exist as a payment method, nothing about cross-location redemption. Square's gift card documentation does support redemption across all locations under one Square account — but with a limit the dossier should carry: gift cards are NOT redeemable across separate Square accounts, which is exactly how independently-owned franchisees are structured. So the franchise-relevant version of this capability is materially weaker than 'yes' implies. https://squareup.com/help/us/en/article/8404-accept-gift-cards · retrieved 2026-08-01 adversarially verified

A single customer loyalty profile, balance, and stored order history is shared across all locations in the brand rather than being per-location.

multi-location-cross-location-loyalty

A Square Loyalty program is defined at the account level and points accrue across the seller's POS, Invoices and Online channels under one profile. https://squareup.com/help/us/en/article/3952-create-a-loyalty-program-with-square · retrieved 2026-08-01

A single location/terminal can operate two or more distinct brands or virtual brands with separate menus, receipts/branding, and separately reportable revenue, on the same hardware and drawer. differentiator

multi-location-multi-brand

Each location has its own 'Location business name' which 'appears on your customers' card statements and digital receipts', its own brand logo and colour 'reflected across Square', its own menus and location-specific reporting, so two brands can be run from one account on the same hardware. Shortfall: a device serves one location at a time - you switch via More > Switch location - and the article states 'you cannot switch locations if you're signed in to Square Register with the use of a device code'. There is no virtual-brand construct inside a single location, so two brands cannot be rung concurrently into one drawer session; the offline-payments article also warns that switching locations destroys pending offline payments. https://squareup.com/help/us/en/article/5580-manage-multiple-locations-with-square · retrieved 2026-08-06

Tax configuration is per-location with support for multiple simultaneous tax rates, jurisdiction-specific rules (e.g. prepared-food vs grocery, inclusive vs exclusive tax), and per-location tax exemptions.

multi-location-multi-tax-jurisdiction

Tax settings are location-scoped in Square, but multiple simultaneous rates, prepared-food vs grocery rules, inclusive/exclusive handling and per-location exemptions are not documented as a set.

Labor rules (overtime, break enforcement, predictive-scheduling compliance) are configurable per location or location group and enforced at the terminal, not just reported after the fact.

multi-location-central-labor-policy

Staff > Settings > Breaks lets you define mandatory meal/rest breaks (multiple-times-per-shift or once-per-shift eligibility), toggle 'Block Ending Breaks Early' to 'prevent team members from ending their breaks early', and convert paid break overages to unpaid - each with an 'Only This Location' / 'All Locations' scope toggle; defaults are seeded from the location's state rules, and 'A missed mandatory break creates a Missed break alert on the timecard at clock out'. Shortfalls: overtime rules (Staff > Settings > Overtime - daily, weekly, daily double-time, 7th-day) are documented with no per-location scope control at https://squareup.com/help/us/en/article/8390-set-your-work-period-and-overtime-rules; the scope control is a location-vs-all toggle, not location groups; and no predictive-scheduling / fair-workweek compliance enforcement is documented. https://squareup.com/help/us/en/article/8391-set-up-breaks · retrieved 2026-08-06

The POS software runs on commodity off-the-shelf hardware (standard iPads, Android tablets, or PCs) that the operator can buy from a third party, rather than only on vendor-supplied proprietary terminals. differentiator

hardware-commodity-devices

Square Stand ($149) and Square Kiosk ($149) turn a customer-supplied iPad into the POS; Square KDS runs on Android tablets. Proprietary Square hardware is optional, not required. https://squareup.com/us/en/hardware · retrieved 2026-08-01

Vendor documentation names the specific client operating systems supported (iOS/iPadOS, Android, Windows, Linux/web) and states minimum OS versions and device specs.

hardware-os-platforms

Square publishes per-device technical specs (e.g. Handheld: Wi-Fi 6E, 25 Mbps down / 3 Mbps up recommended, 0-40C operating range) but a consolidated client-OS support matrix with minimum iOS/Android versions was not found. https://squareup.com/us/en/hardware/handheld/specs · retrieved 2026-08-01

Offers a purpose-built handheld ordering device with an integrated card reader (not a phone case add-on), with published drop rating and IP ingress rating.

hardware-handheld-purpose-built

Square Handheld is purpose-built with an integrated reader and publishes an IP54 ingress rating, but publishes no drop rating — it names Gorilla Glass Victus and an optional Belkin case instead. https://squareup.com/us/en/hardware/handheld/specs · retrieved 2026-08-01

The handheld supports hot-swappable or field-replaceable batteries, or the vendor publishes a rated battery life for a full shift. differentiator

hardware-handheld-battery-swap

Square states 'a battery designed to last through a shift' but publishes no rated hours, and the battery is not documented as field-replaceable or hot-swappable. https://squareup.com/us/en/hardware/handheld/specs · retrieved 2026-08-01

Handhelds support cellular/LTE connectivity as a documented fallback when store Wi-Fi drops, either built into the device or via a vendor-supplied failover.

hardware-handheld-lte

The published spec sheet enumerates connectivity as Wi-Fi 6E only. No cellular option is listed for Square Handheld. https://squareup.com/us/en/hardware/handheld/specs · retrieved 2026-08-01

Terminals continue to take orders, print to kitchen, and record cash sales with the internet down, and the vendor documents explicitly which functions degrade (card auth, loyalty lookup, refunds).

hardware-offline-mode

Offline mode is supported across Register, Terminal, Handheld, Stand and Readers, and Square publishes an explicit list of what degrades. https://squareup.com/help/us/en/article/7777-process-card-payments-with-offline-mode · retrieved 2026-08-01

Sells or supports a dedicated kitchen display system with bump-bar or touch input, station routing, and course/fire timing, as a first-party product rather than an integration-only dependency.

hardware-kds

Square KDS is a first-party Android kitchen display with station routing, expo mode, timers and alerts; $30/mo/device on Plus, $20 on Premium. https://squareup.com/us/en/point-of-sale/restaurants/kitchen-display-system · retrieved 2026-08-01

Offers a self-order kiosk running the same menu and modifier engine as the POS, in both countertop and freestanding form factors, with integrated payment and accessibility (ADA) compliance documented. differentiator

hardware-kiosk

Square Kiosk is an iPad-based self-service stand at $149 with $50/$30 per-device monthly software. Freestanding form factor and documented ADA conformance not found. https://squareup.com/us/en/hardware · retrieved 2026-08-01

Supports drive-thru-specific hardware: outdoor digital menu boards, order confirmation displays, and speaker/headset integration, with a documented timer/speed-of-service measurement.

hardware-drive-thru

OVERTURNED from `no` to partial. The old rationale said no outdoor menu boards, order confirmation displays, headset integration or speed-of-service timers appear anywhere in Square hardware line; three of those four are now documented, and the fourth is the reason this is partial and not yes. Square ships a Drive-Thru mode for Square for Restaurants Premium on Register, iPad and Terminal, with a drive-thru fulfilment type, a dedicated Order Manager tab and vehicle descriptors that print on the kitchen ticket. The cited article documents a real integration with third-party drive-thru hardware: 'Order Confirmation Screen (OCS) is a customer-facing display that shows drive-thru orders in real time as you enter them on your POS', configured against Nanonation/The Howard Company hardware over TCP sockets with a host address, port and lane identifier, and supporting multi-lane setups. Outdoor menu boards are addressed as partner hardware -- the drive-thru product page offers 'preferred pricing on menu boards, confirmation screens, and signage through The Howard Company, our trusted hardware partner with decades of drive-thru expertise' -- and the release note describes the OCS integration as 'providing real-time sync with digital menu boards'. The speed-of-service measurement the claim requires is documented too, as a Reporting API view named SpeedOfService, which 'Combines speed-of-service metrics (order entry time, service time) with sales measures and optional KDS ticket metrics.' What is missing is the audio leg. Across a 1,693-document corpus read 2026-09-09 (482 developer pages from the vendor own llms-full.txt, which declares its own count of 482 and matched on the split; 1,210 squareup.com pages covering the 830-article Support Center and the product, hardware, release-note and Square University sections; and the 255-path, 1,478-schema OpenAPI specification rendered as a searchable artefact of paths, schema names, property names, enums and descriptions -- 15.9M characters), `intercom`, `headsets`, `speaker post`, `two-way audio`, `lane speaker`, `menu speaker`, `loop detector` and `vehicle detection` occur zero times, tokenised and as bare substrings; the 26 hits for headset are all the 3.5mm 'Headset jack' connection type of Square Reader for magstripe, plus accessibility settings. The nearest thing to an audio claim is the drive-thru page headline promising a lane run 'from speaker to window', which describes the lane and integrates nothing. Two of three hardware categories plus the timer, with no order-taking audio path, is partial. https://squareup.com/help/us/en/article/8649-set-up-order-confirmation-screen · retrieved 2026-09-09

Works with standard ESC/POS thermal receipt and kitchen printers from more than one manufacturer (e.g. Epson and Star), including LAN/Ethernet printers, rather than only vendor-branded printers.

hardware-printer-compatibility

Score survives but the citation is wrong and does not support it. I fetched /hardware/compare: it compares only Square-branded devices (Handheld, Terminal, Stand, Register, Kiosk, Reader) and names no third-party printers, drawers, scanners or displays. The supporting evidence is elsewhere — Square's printer compatibility page and hardware-compatibility-by-device article, which name Star and Epson USB/Bluetooth/Wi-Fi/Ethernet receipt and impact kitchen printers (e.g. Star SP742ML/SP742ME). https://squareup.com/us/en/compatibility/accessories/printers · retrieved 2026-08-01 adversarially verified

Supports the standard peripheral set — cash drawers (including multi-drawer per terminal), barcode scanners, scales for by-weight items, and customer-facing displays — with a published compatibility list.

hardware-peripherals

Square's Accessory Compatibility page (formerly help article 6334, which now redirects here) enumerates supported third-party models by category — Printers, Cash drawers, Barcode scanners, Scales and Other — with connection types and setup notes per device. Note it does NOT carry a customer-display category, so this cell rests on the four enumerated peripheral classes. https://squareup.com/us/en/compatibility/accessories · retrieved 2026-08-09 adversarially verified

Card entry happens on a PCI-listed PTS device using validated point-to-point encryption, so the POS application and tablet stay out of PCI scope; the vendor states the merchant's SAQ type.

hardware-p2pe-terminal

PCI-listed devices are now verifiable: Square's Trust Center links its PCI PTS approvals ('S8, S8-1; SPC1-01; SPC2; SPD1-01-A; SPD2; SPD3; SPG1-01, SPH1; SPG1-02, SPH1-02; SPS4; SPS5') and its PCI MPoC listing, reference 2025-01254.001, whose PCI SSC record names 'Square Point of Sale (SPOS) / Square for Appointments (APOS) / Square for Restaurants (RST)...' and lists PTS POI approvals 4-10253 (S8, S8-1), 4-30355 (SPC1-01) and others alongside 'PTS POI contactless (with COTS-native PIN support)'. Encryption is stated first-party: 'All card-present payments are encrypted from end to end.' Shortfalls: what Square holds is an E2EE architecture attestation ('Square P2PE-E2EE Statement letter', NDA-gated), not a PCI-listed validated P2PE solution; and Square nowhere states the merchant's applicable SAQ type - the closest artefact is the NDA-gated 'PCI DSS Merchant Responsibility Matrix 4.0.1', whose published description does not name an SAQ. https://trust.squareup.com/ · retrieved 2026-08-09 · not refetchable · site policy · graded B when read

Supports contactless acceptance directly on a commodity phone or tablet (Tap to Pay on iPhone / Tap to Pay on Android) with no separate reader. differentiator

hardware-tap-to-phone

Tap to Pay on iPhone and Tap to Pay on Android are supported Square acceptance methods requiring no separate reader. https://squareup.com/help/us/en/article/7777-process-card-payments-with-offline-mode · retrieved 2026-08-01

Hardware prices are published per SKU on the vendor's public site, rather than quote-only. differentiator

hardware-pricing-transparency

Every SKU is priced publicly: Register $899, Handheld $399, Terminal $299, Stand $149, Kiosk $149. https://squareup.com/us/en/hardware · retrieved 2026-08-01

Hardware can be purchased outright (owned) as an alternative to a mandatory lease or subscription-bundled rental, and the vendor states which. differentiator

hardware-ownership-vs-lease

Outright purchase is the headline price for every SKU, with optional 12- or 24-month installment financing as an alternative. No mandatory lease. https://squareup.com/us/en/hardware · retrieved 2026-08-01

Vendor documentation confirms whether hardware purchased from the vendor remains usable with other software after cancellation, i.e. it is not software-locked or remotely bricked. differentiator

hardware-usable-after-churn

Upheld, and the old rationale's key sentence -- that Square does not affirmatively state this either way -- is confirmed rather than merely assumed. This claim is satisfied by documentation that answers the question in EITHER direction, so a measured silence is the whole verdict. The cited limited warranty and returns article is the one document that would carry such a term and does not: it covers the warranty period, the returns window and the RMA path, and says nothing about whether hardware keeps working with other software once a subscription ends. Across a 1,693-document corpus read 2026-09-09 (482 developer pages from the vendor own llms-full.txt, which declares its own count of 482 and matched on the split; 1,210 squareup.com pages covering the 830-article Support Center and the product, hardware, release-note and Square University sections; and the 255-path, 1,478-schema OpenAPI specification rendered as a searchable artefact of paths, schema names, property names, enums and descriptions -- 15.9M characters), `no longer usable`, `software locked`, `software-locked`, `bricked`, `runs only`, `proprietary operating system`, `jailbreak`, `sideload`, `refurbish` and `buyback` occur zero times, tokenised and as bare substrings, and `another point of sale` is likewise zero. The nearest statements cut the other way without reaching the claim: the Kiosk page says 'No third-party software needed', which is a pitch and not a lock, and the KDS migration article tells operators to 'Keep your iPads for POS or kiosk use', which is about redeploying general-purpose hardware inside Square rather than about Square-built devices after cancellation. The honest reading is that Square-built Register, Terminal, Handheld and Kiosk run Square software and Square has never published a post-cancellation position on them. https://squareup.com/help/us/en/article/5148-square-hardware-limited-warranty-and-returns · retrieved 2026-09-09

Publishes a hardware warranty term and a replacement/advance-exchange SLA with a stated turnaround (e.g. next-business-day depot swap). differentiator

hardware-rma-sla

Warranty terms are published per device: one year from shipping date for Square Terminal, Square Kiosk, Square Handheld, Square Stand (1st/2nd gen), Reader for contactless and chip and power adapters/hubs; two years for Square Register, its Customer Display and Hub; six months for Reader for magstripe. Exchange is advance-ship: Square sends the replacement first and 'within 14 days of receiving your replacement hardware, send us your old hardware', with a card on file charged only if the defective unit is not returned in that window. Shortfall: no turnaround SLA is stated - neither this article nor the legal Hardware Policies page (squareup.com/us/en/legal/general/hardware) commits to next-business-day or any other despatch/delivery time for the replacement, and no purchasable extended-warranty or depot-swap plan is offered. https://squareup.com/help/us/en/article/5148-square-hardware-limited-warranty-and-returns · retrieved 2026-08-06

Staff can run the ordering or payment app on their own personal phone (BYOD) with a documented permission and security model.

hardware-byod

Staff run the POS app on their own phone and take card payments with no Square hardware: 'Accept contactless payments anywhere on-the-go with just your iPhone - no card reader needed.' The permission and rollout model is documented: the article is scoped to 'team members with the checkout permission to take payments', and 'Once the account owner enables Tap to Pay... all team members under the same account with an eligible device will automatically be able to use Tap to Pay on iPhone.' Device security requirements are stated (iPhone XS or newer, current iOS, automatic date and time, and a device passcode must be set), and there is a dedicated 'Security practices for Tap to Pay on iPhone' section. The equivalent Android article is 7960. Independently listed: PCI SSC MPoC solution 2025-01254.001 covers 'Square for Restaurants (RST)' for COTS-native contactless with PIN on glass. Limits worth noting: no offline payments on Tap to Pay, and it is unavailable in the Square Point of Sale app when signed in with a device code. https://squareup.com/help/us/en/article/7786-get-started-with-tap-to-pay-on-iphone · retrieved 2026-08-09

Provides a remote device-management console showing each terminal, printer, and KDS as online/offline, with remote reboot, software-version visibility, and staged rollout of updates. differentiator

hardware-remote-device-management

RE-POINTED 2026-08-10; value and grade unchanged. The cited article 8098 'Add and manage devices remotely' NO LONGER EXISTS: Square retired the id and 301s it onto article 8339 'Set up device codes', which resolves 200 with a real title. Both load-bearing quotations survive verbatim on the successor: 'you can view all of your device specific information like locations, connectivity, applications used, and more' and 'You can also view errors and status for peripherals connected to your devices', with a View-and-filter-devices step and a Remove-devices step, and Kiosk still a first-class device type at enrolment. The cited filter list ('Status, Location, Device type, Installed apps and Mode') and the Modes cross-reference are re-worded on the successor and are withdrawn as quotations; modes are still described as a companion feature ('while setting up a mode is not a requirement for using device codes, it is beneficial to use both features together'). Shortfalls unchanged: no remote reboot - the nightly reboot time is changed on the device itself under Settings > Hardware > General; no software version in the console's documented columns; and no staged or phased rollout - per https://squareup.com/help/us/en/article/8346-update-software-on-square-terminal-and-square-register 'software updates are released every 2 weeks' and run automatically overnight, with only a per-device Defer Update option. https://squareup.com/help/us/en/article/8339-set-up-device-codes · retrieved 2026-08-10

Integrates with specialty beverage hardware — self-pour tap walls, flow meters, or liquor pour spouts — such that pours post to a POS tab automatically.

hardware-selfpour-scales

iPourIt's own integration page states its self-pour platform integrates 'directly with your POS system, whether it is GoTab, Toast, Clover, Square, or others', so a self-pour tap-wall integration for Square exists. Shortfalls: this is the hardware partner's own marketing page, not independent reporting and not Square documentation; Square publishes nothing on self-pour walls, flow meters or liquor pour spouts in its help centre and no such app was located in the Square App Marketplace restaurants category (squareup.com/us/en/app-marketplace/category/restaurants, which renders client-side and returned an empty shell to a Googlebot fetch); and neither source documents that pours post automatically to an open Square tab, which is what this claim asks. iPourIt separately describes POS integration as a collaborative per-deployment project rather than a self-serve connector. https://ipouritinc.com/streamlining-operations-integrating-ipourit-with-your-pos-system/ · retrieved 2026-08-06

Supports inbound caller ID hardware or a telephony integration that pops the customer record and order history at the POS on an incoming call.

hardware-callerid-integration

Square's telephony is an AI answering service, not a screen pop. Calls go to a Square-issued number - 'AI-powered voice ordering works only with your Square-provided business numbers' - and Square AI takes the order itself; what reaches the seller is a conversation record, since 'The summary of the calls will also be available in Square Messages so you can review your customer inquiries'. The order does not even exist until the caller pays online: 'Your customer's order will only show up in your system and be sent to your POS Order Manager or KDS once the payment is made by your customers following their call.' No inbound call raises a customer record with order history at the POS, and no caller-ID hardware is documented - the tokens `callerid` and `telephony` read zero across 2,983 documents, and the 18 documents containing 'caller' use it in the API sense of the calling application. https://squareup.com/help/us/en/article/8568-take-orders-with-ai-powered-voice-ordering · retrieved 2026-09-10

Public, self-serve API reference documentation is readable without a signed partner agreement, NDA, or sales call.

extensibility-public-api-docs

Full REST and GraphQL reference is public with no NDA, partner agreement or sales call. https://developer.squareup.com/reference/square · retrieved 2026-08-01

API access is included in the base subscription at no additional per-location fee, surcharge, or upgraded plan requirement. differentiator

extensibility-api-access-cost

No per-location API fee, surcharge or plan upgrade is published as a condition of API access. https://developer.squareup.com/docs/build-basics/general-considerations/using-rest-api · retrieved 2026-08-01

A free sandbox or test environment with seeded data is available to developers without owning a paid production account. differentiator

extensibility-free-sandbox

Free Sandbox environment at https://connect.squareupsandbox.com/v2, available without a paid production account. https://developer.squareup.com/docs/build-basics/general-considerations/using-rest-api · retrieved 2026-08-01

Third-party apps authenticate via OAuth 2.0 with scoped, operator-granted, individually revocable permissions (not shared static API keys or credential sharing).

extensibility-oauth-partner-apps

OAuth 2.0 is the documented path for third parties: 'use OAuth to ask the account owner for resource permissions so that you can work on their behalf' — scoped and seller-revocable, distinct from a personal access token. https://developer.squareup.com/docs/build-basics/general-considerations/using-rest-api · retrieved 2026-08-01

The platform pushes real-time webhooks for order lifecycle events (created, modified, paid, voided, refunded) rather than requiring polling.

extensibility-webhooks-push

Push webhooks for order, payment, refund, inventory and customer lifecycle events; polling is not required. https://developer.squareup.com/docs/webhooks/overview · retrieved 2026-08-01

Webhooks are cryptographically signed (e.g. HMAC) AND documented to retry with backoff, with a replayable event log for missed deliveries. differentiator

extensibility-webhook-reliability

HMAC-SHA-256 signature over signature key + notification URL + raw body; 11 retry attempts over 24 hours with exponential backoff and square-retry-number headers; Events API for replaying missed deliveries. https://developer.squareup.com/docs/webhooks/step3validate · retrieved 2026-08-01

A public write API accepts externally originated orders into the POS as first-class tickets that fire to KDS/printers and land in reporting.

extensibility-order-injection-api

Real limitation: only 'Orders with fulfillment that have been fully paid are pushed to the Square Point of Sale and Square Dashboard Order Manager'. An unpaid external order is not a first-class open ticket. https://developer.squareup.com/docs/orders-api/what-it-does · retrieved 2026-08-01

Menu items, modifiers, and prices can be written and updated via API, not just read. differentiator

extensibility-menu-write-api

Catalog API supports upsert of items, variations, modifier lists, modifiers, categories, item options, pricing rules, time periods and images. https://developer.squareup.com/docs/catalog-api/what-it-does · retrieved 2026-08-01

The vendor is a named DoorDash Preferred Integration Partner (DPIP) under the 2026 program requirements. differentiator

extensibility-doordash-preferred

DoorDash publishes its own complete provider registry at https://merchants.doordash.com/api/partner-integrations — 64 providers, each carrying a `qualityStatus` of PREFERRED (12), CERTIFIED (47) or AT_RISK_OF_SUSPENSION (5), plus a features-completed count against the eight high-quality features the program requires. It is served anonymously and merchants.doordash.com/robots.txt permits it (Allow: / with only /cdn-cgi/ and /monitoring barred). This is the instrument the program page points to when it says the roster is tracked in real time, and it supersedes the 2026 announcement post most of this corpus cited — that post introduces its ten names with the word `include`, which makes it a floor, not a ceiling. In that registry this vendor is the entry `square_v2_production`, rendered as 'Square', with qualityStatus PREFERRED and 8 of the 8 high-quality features built. GRADE HARMONISED TO B, 2026-09-11: this URL was first written at grade A. The adversarial pass ruled E on the principle that the rubric grades by the publisher's relationship to the SCORED vendor, and DoorDash is not that vendor. B is the settlement, for two reasons that are not preference: 39 rows already graded a DoorDash-published document B on this claim before today, and one URL on one claim cannot carry two grades; and E is unworkable, because nine of the 47 rows are `yes` on a differentiator-weight claim, which the grade floor refuses below B. B reads as the product documentation of the programme's own publisher, which is what this registry is. The dissent is recorded in verification.jsonl. https://merchants.doordash.com/api/partner-integrations · retrieved 2026-09-11

Direct, first-party certified integrations exist with DoorDash, Uber Eats, and Grubhub without requiring a paid middleware layer (Otter/Chowly/Deliverect/Checkmate). differentiator

extensibility-first-party-delivery-integrations

DoorDash and Uber Eats are direct, vendor-maintained integrations managed from Square Dashboard. Grubhub is not — it requires paid middleware. https://squareup.com/help/us/en/article/8518-integrate-doordash-with-square · retrieved 2026-08-01

The POS is a supported endpoint for at least two major aggregation middleware platforms (Deliverect, Chowly, Otter, Checkmate, ItsaCheckmate).

extensibility-middleware-compatibility

Deliverect is a listed Square App Marketplace app; Chowly, Otter and Checkmate also support Square as an endpoint. https://squareup.com/us/en/app-marketplace/app/deliverect · retrieved 2026-08-01

Native, vendor-maintained connectors exist for QuickBooks Online and at least one other GL/accounting system, with mapped journal entries rather than CSV-only export.

extensibility-accounting-connectors

QuickBooks Online sync is documented (including payroll sync). A second GL system with mapped journal entries rather than CSV was not verified. https://squareup.com/help/us/en/topic/staff-and-payroll · retrieved 2026-08-01

Labor hours export natively to at least two named payroll providers (e.g. Gusto, ADP, Paychex, Paylocity) without manual re-keying.

extensibility-payroll-export

Square Payroll is native and QuickBooks Online sync exists; two named third-party payroll provider integrations were not verified. https://squareup.com/us/en/payroll/pricing · retrieved 2026-08-01

The vendor operates a public integrations marketplace listing named third-party apps that operators can browse and self-install.

extensibility-app-marketplace

Square App Marketplace is public and browsable with self-install of named third-party apps. https://squareup.com/us/en/app-marketplace/app/doordash · retrieved 2026-08-01

The vendor supports a headless/embedded mode where a third-party UI (kiosk, web ordering, drive-thru) drives the POS transaction engine via API.

extensibility-headless-embedded

Orders API plus Terminal API and the Mobile Payments SDK let a third-party UI drive Square's transaction engine, but full open-check headless control is constrained by the fully-paid push requirement. https://developer.squareup.com/docs/orders-api/what-it-does · retrieved 2026-08-01

A complete historical data export (orders, customers, menu, payments metadata) is available to the operator on demand, in a documented machine-readable format, at contract end. differentiator

extensibility-data-portability-exit

While the account is live, CSV export plus full API read is available at no cost. At contract end there is no documented complete-export process and no guaranteed retention window — Square 'may (but have no obligation to) delete' account data. https://squareup.com/us/en/legal/general/ua · retrieved 2026-08-01

Order entry, ticket routing, and check printing continue on-terminal when the internet connection is lost.

reliability-offline-order-entry

Offline acceptance continues on Register/Terminal/Handheld indefinitely (24 hours on Reader/Stand), but Square documents the offline path in payment terms and does not confirm ticket routing or check printing behavior. https://squareup.com/help/us/en/article/7777-process-card-payments-with-offline-mode · retrieved 2026-08-01

Card payments can be accepted while offline via store-and-forward, not just cash-only fallback. differentiator

reliability-offline-card-auth

Held to the highest bar and it survives: Square documents merchant-set per-transaction limits 'between $1 and $50,000', offline acceptance on Register/Terminal/Handheld/Stand/Readers (Stand and Reader capped at 24 hours of acceptance), a hard 72-hour upload expiry, and unambiguous merchant liability: 'You're responsible for any expired, declined, or disputed payments accepted while taking offline payments.' One correction: the dossier's '$100 default' and 'accept offline indefinitely' phrasing were not confirmed in the fetched text — the durable documented facts are the 24-hour acceptance wind https://squareup.com/help/us/en/article/7777-process-card-payments-with-offline-mode · retrieved 2026-08-01 adversarially verified

The vendor publicly documents who bears the loss when a store-and-forward transaction declines after connectivity returns, and states any per-transaction or cumulative offline cap. differentiator

reliability-offline-decline-liability

Square states plainly that the seller bears the loss on expired, declined or disputed offline payments, publishes the per-transaction cap, and sets a 72-hour expiry after which payments cannot be retrieved or reprocessed. https://squareup.com/help/us/en/article/7777-process-card-payments-with-offline-mode · retrieved 2026-08-01

Multiple terminals continue to share a single check/table state over the local network while the internet is down (LAN-only degraded operation, not per-terminal islands). differentiator

reliability-lan-degraded-multi-terminal

Square's own firewall guidance enumerates the protocols its devices speak, and terminal-to-terminal is not among them. Devices require 'NTP' and 'HTTPS (only port 443): All traffic to Square servers is made over HTTPS', and the only local-network exception is printing - 'The following ports are also used for network printers, but these do not require access to the internet' - UDP 22222 and 3289, TCP 9100 to 9109 Check and table state therefore travels through Square rather than across the LAN, and there is no documented peer protocol for terminals to share an open check while the internet is down. What degraded operation Square does provide is per-device rather than shared: 'Offline payments are securely stored in your point of sale app while your device is offline', uploading when that device reconnects. That is islands, which is the arrangement the claim excludes. https://squareup.com/help/us/en/article/8348-set-up-network-requirements-for-square-hardware · retrieved 2026-09-10 adversarially verified

The vendor documents a local/on-premise transaction engine or edge server (not purely cloud-hosted request/response) for the ordering path. differentiator

reliability-local-transaction-engine

Upheld, and now on the vendor's own words instead of an architectural assertion. Square documents offline behaviour extensively -- offline payments reads 622 times across a 1,693-document corpus read 2026-09-09 (482 developer pages from the vendor own llms-full.txt, which declares its own count of 482 and matched on the split; 1,210 squareup.com pages covering the 830-article Support Center and the product, hardware, release-note and Square University sections; and the 255-path, 1,478-schema OpenAPI specification rendered as a searchable artefact of paths, schema names, property names, enums and descriptions -- 15.9M characters) -- so this is not a silence; it is a documented mechanism that is the wrong one. The cited article opens by stating the architecture: 'The Square point of sale apps require an internet connection at all times to function optimally', and describes what happens when it is gone -- 'Offline payments are securely stored in your point of sale app while your device is offline' and 'Offline payments will process automatically when you reconnect your device to the internet within 24 hours (no later than 72 hours).' The developer documentation says the same of the SDK path: offline payments are 'stored (queued) locally on the mobile device running the Mobile Payments SDK application and processed by Square the next time the device successfully connects'. A per-device queue with a 24-to-72-hour expiry, from which EBT/SNAP, Afterpay, Cash App Pay, gift cards, Tap to Pay and keyed card numbers are all excluded, is precisely the degraded cache the claim is written to distinguish from a local transaction engine -- and the OpenAPI spec agrees, giving OfflinePaymentDetails exactly one field, client_created_at, 'The client-side timestamp of when the offline payment was created'. `edge server`, `store and forward`, `local transaction`, `local database` and `on premises` occur zero times, tokenised and as bare substrings. Square also states the positive form exclusively: its restaurants page contrasts 'The biggest benefit of using a cloud-based POS system, rather than a traditional, on-premise system'. Beware the word on-premise on this vendor -- 4 of its 6 occurrences mean on-premise DINING, as in on-premise and online menus. https://squareup.com/help/us/en/article/7777-process-card-payments-with-offline-mode · retrieved 2026-09-09

Kitchen display and/or kitchen printer routing continues to function while offline.

reliability-offline-kds-printing

Square's network requirements article states affirmatively that the ports used for network printers - 'UDP: 22222, 3289' and 'TCP: 9100:9109' - 'do not require access to the internet', i.e. POS-to-kitchen-printer ticket traffic is a local-network path independent of Square's cloud. (An earlier version of this note also argued that the offline-payments article's 'Restrictions and unsupported features' list does not name kitchen printing; that leg is withdrawn - article 7777's list enumerates hardware, payment types, apps, Loyalty and close-of-day reporting and does not claim to be exhaustive of device behaviour, so its silence establishes nothing.) On the Square Community thread 'Can you use an ethernet kitchen printer when in offline mode' the only stated limitation is from a Square Champion, 2023-09-13: 'you can not use network printers in offline mode IF you have to force offline mode by disconnecting from your WiFi network' - i.e. the LAN itself must stay up, which is the normal internet-outage case. Shortfall: Square KDS is cloud-routed and has no offline mode - on the Square Community thread 'KDS Offline Mode' (https://community.squareup.com/t5/Food-and-Beverage/KDS-Offline-Mode/td-p/709200) nika, a Square Community Program Manager, answered on 2025-09-26 that offline mode for KDS 'IS IN DEVELOPMENT! Looking at 2026 but not certain at what point in the year'. So printers can keep printing over the LAN while KDS screens stop receiving orders during an internet or Square outage. Square publishes no article that says in so many words 'kitchen printing continues during an outage'; the printer half rests on the internet-independence sentence above. https://squareup.com/help/us/en/article/8348-set-up-network-requirements-for-square-hardware · retrieved 2026-08-06

The system automatically fails over to a backup printer or KDS station when a configured kitchen printer is unreachable, and alerts staff.

reliability-printer-fallback

The printer profiles article enumerates the entire printer configuration surface (creation from Square Dashboard > Settings > Device management > Profiles > Printer profiles, from the POS app, or from Square KDS) and every setting for every job type - Receipts, In-person order tickets, Online & kiosk order tickets, Order ticket stubs, Void tickets, Barcode Labels - covering font size, single item per ticket, ticket margins, footer, Categories to Print, Include future categories, kitchen names, combine identical items, sorting and compact tickets. No backup-printer, failover, retry or print-failure alert option appears anywhere in it. Routing is described as unconditional fan-out: 'When an order includes an item that belongs to multiple categories, it triggers printing of the order ticket on each printer linked to a printer profile matching any of those categories' - there is no conditional 'if unreachable' semantics. The only failure signalling documented is passive: on iOS an unconfigured printer raises a warning in the Hardware Hub status bar, and Dashboard > Device Management shows 'errors and status for peripherals connected to your devices' - neither is an automatic failover. https://squareup.com/help/us/en/article/8245-set-up-printer-profiles · retrieved 2026-08-06

The vendor documents its conflict-resolution behavior for edits made on two devices during a network partition (e.g. last-write-wins, merge, or operator prompt).

reliability-sync-conflict-handling

Partial: Square documents concurrent-write conflict handling precisely, but for API clients rather than for two terminals across a network partition. The published behaviour is version-checked rejection - 'In your update or delete request, you must provide the version number you received from Square. Otherwise, Square returns a "version mismatch" error on your request and your application must retrieve the object again and then update it' - worked through step by step to a 'VERSION_MISMATCH' error, after which the loser re-reads and retries. The default when the caller omits the check is last-write-wins: 'If you don't specify a version number in an update request, the latest version is assumed.' The shortfall is the scenario: the page describes two online clients racing, not devices reconciling edits made while partitioned, and Square documents no merge, prompt or resolution rule for POS devices rejoining the network. Versioning also covers only 'some of the API resources', with different APIs using different schemes. https://developer.squareup.com/docs/build-basics/common-api-patterns/optimistic-concurrency · retrieved 2026-09-10

The vendor publishes an explicit list of which features are unavailable offline (gift cards, loyalty lookup, refunds, manual card entry, text-to-pay).

reliability-offline-feature-matrix

Square publishes an explicit unavailable-offline list: Afterpay, Cash App Pay, Square Gift Cards, Tap to Pay on iPhone/Android, manually-keyed cards, Square Invoices, POS services mode, the Kiosk app, loyalty point accrual, and close-of-day reporting. https://squareup.com/help/us/en/article/7777-process-card-payments-with-offline-mode · retrieved 2026-08-01

A public, per-component status page exists showing current and historical incident state without a login.

reliability-public-status-page

issquareup.com is Square's official public status hub (incident.io), reachable without a login. https://www.issquareup.com/ · retrieved 2026-08-01

24/7/365 live human support by phone is included in the base subscription, not sold as a premium support tier.

reliability-247-live-support

24/7 phone support is explicitly a Square Premium ($149/mo/location) entitlement, not included in the Free or $49 Plus base subscription. https://squareup.com/us/en/press/unified-pricing-and-packaging · retrieved 2026-08-01

The vendor offers in-person on-site installation and go-live support (first-party or certified dealer network), not remote-only self-install. differentiator

reliability-onsite-install

Square's own post announcing Premium Networking Solutions has a section 'Professional installers for hands-off setup': 'we've built a network of certified installers who follow the same configuration guidelines we recommend. This is especially useful for larger or more complex spaces... Connect with your Sales rep to understand if you are eligible for site assessment and installation of networking equipment.' The restaurants product page likewise says 'Square Support is here to help you with everything from migrating gift cards to onsite networking installation'. Shortfalls: this is a certified third-party installer network for networking equipment only, not POS installation or go-live support; it is eligibility-gated through a sales rep rather than offered as a purchasable service; no first-party on-site POS install or go-live programme is documented; and the documented default path is self-install with step-by-step guides. Evidence is a vendor blog post, not documentation. https://squareup.com/us/en/the-bottom-line/inside-square/professionalgrade-network-connectivity · retrieved 2026-08-06

The vendor performs the initial menu build as part of onboarding rather than leaving it entirely to the operator. differentiator

reliability-menu-build-service

Square Dashboard > Menus > Create a Menu offers 'Upload a file, photo, or URL of your existing menu' (PDF, JPG or PNG, or a link) via the WoFlow integration: you name the menu, pick the location, and 'Square will send you an email when your menu is ready. Most menu builds take under 24 hours.' A second path, 'Import your menu from another platform', transfers menu data from an existing platform such as Toast or DoorDash by signing in to that platform or sharing a public URL, after which the operator reviews and clicks Approve. The build is done for the operator rather than left to them. Caveat on scope: what is built is the item/price menu - the operator still configures modifiers, kitchen routing categories, floor plan and printer profiles - and the pipeline is automated (WoFlow) rather than a staffed onboarding consultant. https://squareup.com/help/us/en/article/6424-create-menus-with-square-for-restaurants · retrieved 2026-08-06

A hardware replacement/advance-exchange program with a stated turnaround time is included or purchasable.

reliability-hardware-replacement-sla

A no-cost advance-exchange programme is included with every unit's warranty: Square ships the replacement first and 'within 14 days of receiving your replacement hardware, send us your old hardware, including all original cables and accessories', with a prepaid label emailed after the claim and a card charged only if the old unit is not returned in that window. Warranty coverage is one year from shipping date for most hardware, two years for Square Register and its Customer Display and Hub, six months for Reader for magstripe. Shortfall: no turnaround time is stated - neither this article nor the legal Hardware Policies page commits to a despatch or delivery timeframe for the replacement - and no purchasable upgrade (expedited swap, depot service or extended protection plan) is offered. https://squareup.com/help/us/en/article/5148-square-hardware-limited-warranty-and-returns · retrieved 2026-08-06

The vendor publishes a current PCI DSS v4.0/4.0.1 Attestation of Compliance or equivalent (e.g. validated P2PE listing) covering the post-March-2025 future-dated requirements.

reliability-pci-dss-4-attestation

The Square Trust Center publishes 'PCI DSS AOC', document 'Square PCI DSS 4.0.1 Service Providers AOC 2026', described as: 'Square is certified as a PCI DSS 4.0.1 Level 1 Service Provider, the highest level of PCI DSS validation. We validate this certification on an annual basis.' It is accompanied by a 'PCI DSS Merchant Responsibility Matrix' at 4.0.1 and a 'PCI PIN' AOC, and by two public PCI SSC listings - PCI PTS approvals and an MPoC solution listing (reference 2025-01254.001) that names Square for Restaurants. A 4.0.1 attestation dated 2026 necessarily covers the requirements that became effective 31 March 2025. The AOC itself is released on an NDA request through the portal, which is the standard posture and is precisely the obtaining route the previous note said did not exist. Retrieval note: trust.squareup.com is a Vendict SPA; the index was read from its public backing API. https://trust.squareup.com/ · retrieved 2026-08-09 · not refetchable · site policy · graded B when read

Multi-factor authentication is enforceable on back-office and POS administrative logins, with role-based permissions.

reliability-mfa-role-based-access

MFA is documented and enforceable business-wide, not merely available: under 'Business two-step verification, toggle on Two-step verification for team members', after which 'Each time they sign in, they need their passcode and a verification code'; 'If team members don't enable two-step verification after reading the email, they'll be required to do so the next time they sign in to their Square account,' and new team members see the setup when their account is created. Three factors are supported - SMS, voice call, or an authenticator app (Google Authenticator, Microsoft Authenticator, Authy) - and it covers both surfaces the claim names: 'every time you sign in to the Square app or Square Dashboard'. Role-based permissions are the Advanced Access custom permission sets. Weakening detail worth recording: 'Remember this device for 90 days' suppresses the code between re-challenges. https://squareup.com/help/us/en/article/5593-2-step-verification · retrieved 2026-08-09

A public, free training library (video/LMS) and a practice/training mode on the terminal exist for staff onboarding.

reliability-self-serve-training

Square University is a free public training library with restaurant-specific courses (e.g. 'Square Terminal: Table Maps & Coursing'). A terminal training/practice mode is not documented. https://squareup.com/us/en/square-university/restaurants/square-terminal-table-maps-coursing · retrieved 2026-08-01

Any terminal can assume the master/server role automatically if the designated primary terminal or local server fails. differentiator

reliability-failover-terminal-role

There is no master or server terminal role in Square for another terminal to assume. The architecture Square documents is every device to the cloud: the network requirements enumerate 'NTP' and 'HTTPS (only port 443): All traffic to Square servers is made over HTTPS', with local ports reserved solely for network printers, so no terminal hosts state for its peers. Degraded operation is correspondingly per-device - 'Offline payments are securely stored in your point of sale app while your device is offline' - and Square's resilience post locates redundancy in its own infrastructure rather than in the restaurant, describing a decision 'to operate our most critical systems, like Square Payments, Square Point of Sale, Login, and Authentication, across multiple AWS regions'. The token `failover` and the phrases `master terminal` and `server terminal` each read zero across 2,983 documents. https://squareup.com/help/us/en/article/8348-set-up-network-requirements-for-square-hardware · retrieved 2026-09-10 adversarially verified

Terminals support an automatic cellular/LTE failover for connectivity, first-party or documented.

reliability-cellular-backup

Square Handheld's published connectivity spec is Wi-Fi 6E only, with no cellular option. No first-party LTE failover product is documented. https://squareup.com/us/en/hardware/handheld/specs · retrieved 2026-08-01

Vendor publicly offers a month-to-month subscription with no minimum multi-year term commitment for its core POS software tier. differentiator

commercial-month-to-month-contract

Terms state subscription fees are 'charged on the first of every month until canceled' and cancellation is self-serve from account settings; the pricing page states 'no locked-in contracts.' https://squareup.com/us/en/legal/general/ua · retrieved 2026-08-01

Vendor's published terms of service or MSA state no early termination fee / no liquidated damages for cancelling the software subscription before term end. differentiator

commercial-no-early-termination-fee

No ETF or liquidated damages appear in the General Terms; the only stated consequence is no refund or credit for a fee already due or paid. https://squareup.com/us/en/legal/general/ua · retrieved 2026-08-01

The auto-renewal term and the required cancellation notice window (e.g. 30/60/90 days) are stated in publicly accessible contract terms rather than only in a signed quote.

commercial-autorenew-terms-published

Monthly auto-charge until cancellation is stated in public terms, with cancellation available at any time from account settings — no notice window required. https://squareup.com/us/en/legal/general/ua · retrieved 2026-08-01

The POS software can be purchased and operated with a third-party payment processor of the operator's choice (no mandatory in-house processing lock). differentiator

commercial-processing-not-bundled

Square is the merchant of record for all card volume and the POS cannot be operated with a third-party processor. Square's fee article enumerates acceptance economics with no processor selection in it: 'you'll always pay one low rate per card payment'; 'This fee covers all credit card fees and applies to every card brand at the same rate... and applies to all businesses'; 'Square's processing fees are deducted before funds are transferred to your linked bank account'; and the only non-Square tenders recognised are 'Cash, Check, and Other Tender'. The security page states the structural reason - 'As the merchant of record, we maintain PCI certification so you don't have to individually validate your compliance' - and the Trust Center describes Square as a 'PCI DSS 4.0.1 Level 1 Service Provider', i.e. the processor itself. This is the platform's hardest lock-in. https://squareup.com/help/us/en/article/5068-what-are-square-s-fees · retrieved 2026-08-09

Vendor publishes an interchange-plus (cost-plus) processing rate option with the markup stated as a specific bps + per-transaction figure, rather than only blended/flat card-present rates. differentiator

commercial-interchange-plus-published

Square publishes only blended flat rates (2.6/2.5/2.4% + 15c card present). Volume pricing exists as quote-only 'Square Pro'; no bps + per-transaction markup is published. https://squareup.com/help/us/en/article/5068-what-are-square-s-fees · retrieved 2026-08-01

The processing agreement caps or prohibits unilateral vendor-initiated rate increases outside of pass-through interchange/network changes, or grants penalty-free exit on any increase. differentiator

commercial-rate-increase-clause

Square's General Terms contain no cap and no prohibition on unilateral increases: 'We reserve the right to change any Subscription Fee upon reasonable advance notice. Your continued use of Subscription Services after notice of a change to our Subscription Fee will automatically establish your agreement to such changes.' No definition of 'reasonable' notice is given and no clause ties an increase to a special exit right. What partly satisfies the claim is the absence of lock-in rather than a rate clause: 'You may cancel a Subscription Service at any time from your Square Account settings', with no termination fee, and the restaurants pricing page markets 'No long-term contracts required'. Shortfalls: the exit right is general, not granted on increase; a cancelling seller keeps access only through the current billing period and 'will not be entitled to a refund or credit for any Subscription Fee already due or paid', so an increase cannot be escaped mid-period; and the terms contain no cap on changes to card-processing rates either, only pass-through language. https://squareup.com/us/en/legal/general/ua · retrieved 2026-08-06

Per-location and per-additional-terminal software pricing is published as specific dollar figures on the vendor's public site (not 'contact sales' only).

commercial-pricing-published

$0 / $49 / $149 per location per month published, plus per-device add-on pricing (KDS $30 or $20; Kiosk $50 or $30) and the $99/location MarketMan inventory add-on. Only Square Pro is contact-sales. https://squareup.com/us/en/point-of-sale/restaurants/pricing · retrieved 2026-08-01

Individual modules (online ordering, KDS, loyalty, inventory, payroll, marketing) can be purchased à la carte and cancelled independently without repricing the base POS subscription. differentiator

commercial-module-unbundling

The October 2025 reset moved the OPPOSITE way — 18 a-la-carte subscriptions collapsed into three bundles, so online ordering, loyalty, marketing and staff are no longer separately cancellable. Only KDS, Kiosk, Restaurant Inventory, Payroll and Franchises remain independently priced add-ons. https://squareup.com/us/en/press/unified-pricing-and-packaging · retrieved 2026-08-01

All required terminals, KDS screens, and printers can be purchased outright at a published price, with no mandatory multi-year hardware lease or rental.

commercial-hardware-purchase-outright

Every terminal, stand, kiosk and register is purchasable outright at a published price; financing is optional. Printers and drawers are third-party purchasable. https://squareup.com/us/en/hardware · retrieved 2026-08-01

Vendor documents support for at least one non-proprietary/third-party hardware option (e.g. standard iPad, Epson/Star ESC/POS printers, generic cash drawer) rather than requiring vendor-only devices. differentiator

commercial-hardware-not-locked

Support documentation covers receipt and kitchen printers connected over Ethernet, Wi-Fi, USB, Bluetooth and AirPrint, states 'AirPrint support helps the integration with any printer that uses AirPrint protocol', and names non-Square models (Brother QL-1110, Star TSP847II) as popular AirPrint printers; it also documents the POS app running on customer-supplied iOS and Android devices (Android needing a USB OTG adapter), and notes the limitation that connecting a printer directly to an iOS device via Lightning or USB-C is not supported. Article 7103 gives per-brand Epson and Star procedures for reading the printer's IP (hold Feed while powering on) and assigning a static IP for kitchen printing; article 8354 documents USB and printer-driven cash drawers including the Star mPOP. https://squareup.com/help/us/en/article/8246-connect-a-printer-to-square · retrieved 2026-08-06

Operators can self-serve export their full transactional history (orders, line items, payments, labor) to CSV or a documented API without contacting support or paying a fee.

commercial-data-export-self-serve

Transaction, item, customer and labor data are exportable to CSV from Dashboard and readable in full via the free public API, with no support ticket or fee. https://developer.squareup.com/reference/square · retrieved 2026-08-01

Guest/customer records, loyalty balances or point ledgers, and gift-card liability balances are exportable in machine-readable form by the operator. differentiator

commercial-export-customer-and-loyalty

Customer records export via Customer Directory CSV and the Customers API. Loyalty point ledger and gift-card outstanding-liability balances are not documented as exportable artifacts. https://developer.squareup.com/reference/square · retrieved 2026-08-01

Contract or documentation specifies a post-termination data retrieval window (a defined number of days during which the operator can still export their data) rather than immediate cutoff. differentiator

commercial-post-termination-export-window

Explicitly absent: on termination Square 'may (but have no obligation to) delete your information and account data stored on our servers.' No defined retrieval window. https://squareup.com/us/en/legal/general/ua · retrieved 2026-08-01

Published terms explicitly state the merchant owns its transaction and customer data, and constrain the vendor's right to use or resell that data (beyond aggregated/de-identified use) for its own products or marketing. differentiator

commercial-data-ownership-clause

Section 5 says you 'retain all rights in your Content' but simultaneously grants Square a 'worldwide, non-exclusive, royalty-free, fully-paid, transferable, irrevocable, perpetual, and sub-licensable' license to use it. Ownership is nominal; the license is broad and not constrained to aggregated or de-identified use. https://squareup.com/us/en/legal/general/ua · retrieved 2026-08-01

Vendor documents validated P2PE or hardware-encrypted card entry plus tokenization such that the merchant's PCI scope is reduced to SAQ A / SAQ P2PE-HW, and names the applicable SAQ.

commercial-pci-p2pe-tokenization

Hardware-encrypted card entry is documented and independently listed: the PCI SSC MPoC listing (reference 2025-01254.001) names Square for Restaurants and records PTS POI contact and contactless entry with COTS-native PIN, backed by PTS approvals 4-10253 (S8, S8-1), 4-30355 (SPC1-01) and others; Square states 'no unencrypted payment data touches your device or application... All card-present payments are encrypted from end to end.' Card-on-file tokenization is a documented product. Shortfalls: what Square holds is an E2EE architecture attestation letter, not a PCI-listed validated P2PE solution; and Square does not name the seller's applicable SAQ type anywhere - the nearest artefact, the NDA-gated 'PCI DSS Merchant Responsibility Matrix 4.0.1', is described as delineating requirement ownership, not as assigning an SAQ. https://trust.squareup.com/ · retrieved 2026-08-09 · not refetchable · site policy · graded B when read

Vendor documents PCI DSS v4.0.1 future-dated controls in effect since 31 Mar 2025 — notably MFA for all access to the cardholder data environment including POS and back-office logins, and (for hosted ordering pages) payment-page script integrity monitoring per Req 6.4.3/11.6.1.

commercial-pci-dss-4-controls

Partial: Square documents the allocation of PCI responsibility clearly and the v4.0.1 control detail not at all. It states it carries the obligation as merchant of record - 'As the merchant of record, we maintain PCI certification so you don't have to individually validate your compliance' - and names 'PCI Data Security Standard, Level 1' and ISO 27001 certification. The shortfall is everything the claim specifies: no DSS version is named anywhere, and the phrases `PCI DSS v4` and `script integrity` read zero across 2,983 documents, as do Requirements 6.4.3 and 11.6.1. The only MFA guidance Square publishes is delegated to the seller's own identity provider for Enterprise SSO - 'Enable multi-factor authentication (MFA) policies in your Okta admin console for all users accessing Square' - not a statement about MFA into the cardholder data environment. Bounded deliberately: Square directs sellers elsewhere for the detail - 'Visit the Square Trust Center for self-service access to certifications, audit reports, and supporting materials' - and trust.squareup.com's robots.txt bars us, so this measures the crawlable surface only. https://squareup.com/us/en/payments/secure · retrieved 2026-09-10

Product provides in-app tooling for CCPA/CPRA and GDPR data-subject requests — locating, exporting, and deleting an individual guest's records — plus a published DPA the operator can execute.

commercial-privacy-dsar-tooling

In-app GDPR tooling is documented: 'If you receive a data request under GDPR from one of your Square customers, you can use our GDPR Dashboard Tool to fulfil your customer's requests and download a report to document your compliance', with 'most of the information you need available directly from your online Square Dashboard', plus a DeleteCustomer API endpoint for data held by app integrations and in-app edit/merge/delete of customer profiles. A DPA the operator can rely on is published at https://squareup.com/us/en/legal/general/data-processing, covering Square as processor and as controller, the CCPA service-provider undertakings, subprocessor notification and standard contractual clauses for transfers. Shortfalls: there is no equivalent in-app CCPA/CPRA request tool - help article 6753 gives sellers procedural guidance and a phone number/portal for submitting the seller's own request to Square, not a per-guest workflow; the GDPR tool 'can only fulfil requests made by your customers' and employee requests must be routed to Square's Customer Success team; and for data held on Square's side the US GDPR FAQ tells sellers to 'contact Square to obtain any personal data stored on our end' rather than exporting it themselves. https://squareup.com/help/gb/en/article/6419-gdpr-on-how-to-handle-a-data-request-from-your-customers-or-employees · retrieved 2026-08-06

Vendor publishes an accessibility conformance report (VPAT/ACR) claiming WCAG 2.1 AA (or later) for its self-order kiosk and consumer web-ordering surfaces, including a documented tactile/audio non-visual access mode on kiosks. differentiator

commercial-wcag-kiosk-accessibility

A documented audio non-visual access mode exists on buyer-facing hardware: 'TalkBack is automatically enabled on the Square Terminal, Square Handheld, and on the customer display for Square Register when headphones are inserted into the audio jack', with Square Terminal and the Square Register customer display carrying audio jacks and Square Handheld shipping a USB-C audio jack adapter; VoiceOver is supported on iOS and Square Stand, and a documented limitation is that VoiceOver/TalkBack are unavailable when a Reader for magstripe (headset jack, v1) occupies the jack without a splitter. Shortfalls: no accessibility conformance report is published - squareup.com/us/en/legal/general/accessibility returns 404, the security pages claim only ISO 27001 and PCI DSS Level 1, and the Trust Center at trust.squareup.com is a client-rendered Vendict portal that serves no document list to an unauthenticated fetch; no WCAG 2.1 AA conformance claim appears for any Square surface; the accessibility article does not mention the Square Kiosk product at all, and Square Online's web-accessibility article (7131) offers site-owner guidance plus third-party marketplace widgets rather than a conformance claim for Square's own checkout. https://squareup.com/help/us/en/article/8337-set-up-accessibility-features · retrieved 2026-08-06

POS supports card-network-compliant dual pricing / cash discount or surcharging with automatic exclusion of debit and prepaid cards from any surcharge, and required receipt and menu-board disclosure of the fee. differentiator

commercial-dual-pricing-compliant

Surcharging shipped in the May 2025 F&B release as 'pass credit card fees to customers'. Automatic debit/prepaid exclusion, network cap enforcement, and required receipt/menu-board disclosure are not documented. https://squareup.com/us/en/press/releases-food-and-beverage · retrieved 2026-08-01