Create and edit items
About item creation
Items are sellable goods and services that make up your item catalogue. As you add your business details to Square, you can create, edit and manage items to check out customers faster, know what’s selling best and track inventory. Items can also be created and tracked across multiple business locations. Setting up items helps streamline your business by enabling you to count stock and see sales trends for your inventory across your entire business.
Square is rolling out a simplified item creation and editing experience in Dashboard. This update focuses on clarity and efficiency, with an improved layout that brings the most commonly edited attributes to the top of the page—minimizing the need for scrolling and speeding up your workflow.
The new interface is also adaptive, revealing relevant features based on your business type and the kind of item you’re selling.
Some of the key benefits of this update include:
- You can now quickly edit name, price, description, images, taxes, categories, locations and channels, all near the top of the page.
- It’s now simpler to update and manage stock or item availability.
- Creating variations using option sets has been streamlined.
Before you begin
You can create and edit items from Square Dashboard and Square Point of Sale. When you create, edit or delete an item, the change will reflect in your Square Dashboard, point-of-sale app and website.
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When creating or editing an item, you can choose any of the following item types:
Prepared food and beverage: Best for restaurants and other food venues. Includes optional nutritional information for buyers with calorie counts, dietary preferences and allergens.
Physical good: Best for retail items such as clothing or jewellery, or non-perishable foods like bottled wine.
Event: Sell tickets to in-person or online events, and include location details as well as times.
Digital: Lets you sell a digital file for download, like an eBook or song, that you can manually send to the customer.
Other: Best for items you will fulfill manually.
If your business uses specific unit types (such as food items by weight), you need to create your unit types first in order to apply them when creating items. Learn how to create and edit item unit types.
If you’re creating multiple items at once, you can bulk import items.
To categorize items, you can either use categories for retail items or menus for prepared food and beverage items. Learn how to Create and edit item categories and create and update menus.
Step 1: Create or edit an item
- Sign in to Square Dashboard and go to Items & services (or Items & menus or Items & inventory) > Items.
- Click Create item.
- Click Item type and choose your item type.
- Enter item information:
- Name: Click (•••) to select Add customer-facing name or Add kitchen name.
- Description: Add item description or click Generate in the Description field to have a description automatically written using generative AI.
- Enter additional item details and click Save when finished.
To delete an item from your Item library, click (•••) next to the item name, then click Delete. Alternatively, click into an item > click Actions > Delete > Delete Item.
- Open your point-of-sale app and tap ≡ More.
- Tap Items > All items.
- Click Create Item or tap an existing item to edit.
- Tap the square tile to add a label, upload an optional image or choose the tile colour that will appear on your item grid.
- Enter item information:
- Name: Tap Add customer-facing name or Add kitchen name.
- Description: Add item description or click Generate in the Description field to have a description automatically written using generative AI.
- Set up additional item features and tap Save when finished.
To delete an item from your Item Library, tap on an item’s name, scroll down and tap Delete Item From This Location > Confirm delete.
Step 2: Automatically generate item descriptions
When creating or editing an item, you can use AI to generate an item description. For scanned items, product information is sourced from third-party databases and rewritten into item descriptions. Review generated content for quality and accuracy.
- Sign in to your Square Dashboard and go to Items & services (or Items & menus or Items & inventory) > Items.
- Choose an item to edit, or click Create item.
- From the description box, click Generate.
- Provide Keywords and choose a Length and Tone to include in your description. Click Generate.
- Review the generated description, then click Insert.
- Click Save.
Click Rewrite > Insert to generate a new item description. You must choose a new length, tone or keywords to rewrite an item description.
- From the navigation menu, tap ≡ More > Items > All Items.
- Choose an item to edit or tap Create Item.
- Below the description box, tap Generate description.
- Provide Keywords and choose a Length and Tone to include in your description. Tap Generate.
- Review the generated description, then tap Insert.
- Tap Save.
Tap Try again > Insert to generate a new item description. You must choose a new length, tone or keywords to rewrite an item description.
Step 3: Assign items
To finish creating items, you’ll need to assign them to specific locations and sales channels (like your point-of-sale, website or delivery apps), helping you control operations like inventory management, as well as your buyer experience. You can assign items from Square Dashboard at any time.
- Sign in to Square Dashboard and go to Items & services (or Items & menus or Items & inventory) > Items > Item library.
- Select an existing item or click Create item.
- Under “Locations and channels,” Edit the locations or channels and click Done.
- Click Save.
By default, your items are available across all selected locations and channels, but you can create location overrides so that, through a specific channel, your item isn’t available at a particular location. For example, an item can be available on all of your websites, but websites that show a specific location where the item isn’t available won’t display your item at that location.
- Sign in to Square Dashboard and go to Items & services (or Items & menus or Items & inventory) > Items > Item library.
- Select an existing item or click Create item.
- Under “Locations and channels,” click Customize channels by location.
- Expand a location to see all of the channels where the location appears.
- Check the specific channel where the item is not available at the location.
- Click Save.