Stocktaking with Square: what the £19 reader tracks, and the Theft button to leave alone

Square is the other till you see everywhere in small pubs: the reader is £19 plus VAT, in-person payments cost 1.75%, and basic stock tracking is included for nothing. The stock side is a tidy unit counter with one feature I want to talk you out of using carelessly: an adjustment menu that invites you to write off missing stock as Theft before you have proved anything of the sort.

This is the third till in the series, after Epos Now and Zettle. Same rules as before: everything below about Square comes from Square’s own published help pages and price list, checked today, and I’ll be straight about where a till stops and a count starts.

What Square’s stock side actually does

Stock tracking lives in the Square Dashboard and the Point of Sale app. You keep a count per item through the Quantity field, and if a product has variations, say a 125ml and a 175ml button on the same wine, you toggle Advanced Stock Tracking on inside the Variations section to hold a separate count per variation. Once tracking is on, the figure moves on its own: their pages say stock updates from Point of Sale sales, Square Invoices and orders shipped through your online store.

Manual adjustments carry a reason from a fixed list: Stock received, Inventory Re-count, Damage, Theft, Loss and Restock return. More on two of those in a minute.

The low-stock email arrives at half past one in the morning

Alerts are per item. You pick the stock level that triggers one from the Update stock alert window, items running low show a yellow circle in the Stock column, and the email lands on a schedule I have not seen another till admit to in writing: low-stock alert emails are sent 90 minutes after each location’s configured closing time. Close at midnight and Square emails you at half past one.

That sounds daft until you treat it as what it is, a morning ordering prompt rather than a live warning. The till is telling you what to put on the next order, not what to run to the cellar for. Set the alert levels like par levels, one delivery cycle of cover plus a weekend, and the half-one email becomes your draft order list.

Do not press Theft on a number you haven’t proved

Here is my problem with the adjustment menu. Theft and Loss sit right there next to Inventory Re-count, and a missing figure is only ever one button press away from becoming an accusation in your records.

Say the till says six bottles of premium lager are gone that the shelf still owes you, £31.20 at £5.20 a bottle. Before that becomes Theft in anyone’s books: recount the line, check whether Tuesday’s delivery ever got booked in, check whether the same lager lives under two buttons with two names, and check the fridge behind the other bar. In my experience a gap that size is pouring, paperwork or counting error far more often than it is a person, and here is the full routine for the gaps that survive a recount. Use Inventory Re-count as your default reason and save the ugly labels for the day you have evidence. A written stock record that casually says Theft is not a neutral document if a dispute ever reaches a tribunal or an insurer.

The plumbing: getting your list in and out

Square’s import tool works in both directions: download a report of your current inventory, edit the quantities in bulk, and upload it back. Their page is plain about the formats: Excel and CSV file templates are the only supported file types, custom templates aren’t supported. For a pub that is all you need. Your whole product library with stock figures comes out as a spreadsheet in a couple of clicks, which also means you are never locked in.

Where unit counting stops working

Square decrements what was rung, not what was poured, the same as every unit counter. On a case of bottled lager those are the same number, so tracking earns its keep on bottles, cans and snacks. On draught and open spirits they are different numbers, and the difference is precisely the stock loss you are trying to find. An 88-pint keg only becomes 88 rung pints if nothing is lost to line cleaning, fobbing and drip, and it never is. Vianet’s meter data across 11,000 pubs puts drinks poured that never reach the till at 2% before you even get to pouring losses. No adjustment reason in a dropdown fixes that; only a physical count does.

The routine that makes Square useful for stock

• One product, one button. Duplicate items under two names split the sales history and quietly ruin every comparison you’ll ever run.
• Count weekly, at least the worst five lines. Weigh the open spirits, count the sealed stock, one method per product.
• Pull the sales figures for the exact period between counts. Dashboard reports export the same way the inventory does, to a spreadsheet.
• Compare counted usage against rung sales line by line. The gap is your variance, and here is what acceptable looks like before you lose any sleep.

Does StockTap plug into Square?

Not natively, and I’d rather say that flat out than hint at a sync that doesn’t exist. What works today is the same CSV round trip as the other tills in this series: export your items from the Square Dashboard, import them into StockTap, count by weighing or tenths, then type the till’s total into the daily spot check and read the variance. My own 270-line library took a few minutes each way, and you only do the full trip once at setup.

On fees, Square’s published rate is 1.75% per in-person payment, re-checked today and unchanged from when I wrote the card fees guide, which has what that costs per pint and where a contract deal overtakes pay-as-you-go.

Common questions

Can Square do a full pub stocktake on its own?

No. It keeps honest unit counts on packaged stock and knocks them down per sale, which is worth having. Draught and open spirits need a physical count, because a till records serves rung, not liquid used, and the gap between those two numbers is where a pub’s stock loss lives.

Should I use the Theft and Loss adjustment reasons?

Rarely, and never on a first count. Default to Inventory Re-count, then work the gap: recount, deliveries, duplicate buttons, the other fridge. Theft in your stock records is a claim about people, and you want evidence before your paperwork starts making claims.

How do I get my product list out of Square?

The Dashboard’s import and export tool downloads your current inventory as a spreadsheet and accepts bulk updates back in Excel or CSV. Custom templates aren’t supported, their words, so stick to their file layout.

Which till is this series doing next?

SumUp, then ICRTouch. If yours isn’t covered yet, the EPOS integration guide covers the general case of making any till and any stock system talk to each other.