Split a check by item or seat

Who is this article for?

Sellers with the checkout permission to take payments. Set permissions in Square Dashboard.

Square for Restaurants Free, Plus, or Premium subscribers.

About splitting checks

Your staff can split checks or payments among multiple guests or multiple payment types, by item or seat. There are two ways to do this:

Split a check:

By Item: When you split a check, you can select items and move them to a new check so guests can pay by item separately. This option is useful in scenarios where one guest leaves early and wants to pay for their meal before they go.
By Seat: When you split a check by seat, any items assigned to a single seat will each move to their own check. This option is useful when you have seating enabled and each guest wants to pay for their individual order.

Split a payment

When you split a payment, you can only split by amounts and not by individual items from the check. This option covers scenarios where you need to split a single check into multiple payments, like when a large group of guests wants to pay separately.

Before you begin

When a check is split by seat, then any discounts, coupons, or service charges applied to specific items or configured to be item specific will be moved alongside the item they are associated with. If there are any cart-level service charges, discounts, or promotions, then those would remain on the original check and can be moved manually.

Before you can split a check by seat or item, you need to enable seat tracking for the specific device from your Square Dashboard. Learn how to Customize table management settings.

You can split a check with Square for Restaurants mobile POS, but splitting an item (e.g. a bottle of wine split multiple ways) is not available.

Learn more about how to Process split payments.

Split by seat or item

Split a check by seat

Open your Square Restaurants POS app.
Select the check you’d like to split and tap Actions > Split.
Choose Split by seat.
This will automatically create new checks for each seat that contains items in the check. For any items assigned to the table or that you’d like to further move, you can further move items between split checks.
Once the items are moved to their new checks, tap Save.