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Split a bill 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 or Plus subscribers.
  • About splitting bills 

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

    Split a bill:

    • By item: When you split a bill, you can select items and move them to a new bill 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.

      • Split items:  You can choose to split individual items in portions (e.g. ⅓ of a bottle of wine) across newly created bills. Split items can be recombined as long as you are still in the current split bill process, or later, if all parts of the items are returned to the original bill.

    • By seat: When you split a bill by seat, any items assigned to a single seat will each move to their own bill and items assigned to multiple seats will be evenly split among them. This option is useful in scenarios where 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 bill. This option covers scenarios where you need to split a single bill into multiple payments, like when a large group of guests wants to pay separately.

    Before you begin 

    When a bill 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 bill and can be moved manually. Before you can split a bill by seat, you need to enable seat tracking for the specific device from your Square Dashboard. Learn how to Customize table management settings.

    Currently, you cannot split:

    • Sell by unit/fractional quantity items

    • Items that are portions of a previously split item

    A modifier’s cost can’t be split at sub-line item level. Their cost will be accurately split when dividing the total cost of the item they are attached to. If you void a previously split item from any of its fractions, the item is automatically recombined in the process. Learn more about how to Process split payments.

    Split by seat or item 

    Split a bill by seat

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

    Split a bill by item

    1. Open your Square Restaurants POS app.
    2. Select the bill you’d like to split and tap Actions > Split bill.
    3. Choose Split by item.
    4. Choose the item(s) you’d like to move to another bill.
    5. Tap Create New Bill.
    6. Select Save All.

    Split items

    The ability to split items or recombine split items is available only for Square for Restaurants Plus subscribers.

    Split individual items

    1. Open your Square Restaurants POS app.
    2. Select the bill you’d like to split and tap Actions > Split bill.
    3. Select your item(s) > Split item(s).
    4. Select Split evenly and in how many ways or Customize split.
    5. Choose the amount(s) to split by.
    6. Tap Save.

    Split all items on a bill evenly

    1. Open your Square Restaurants POS app.
    2. Select the bill you’d like to split and tap Actions > Split bill.
    3. Tap Split evenly > choose the number of ways you want to split.
    4. Tap Save.

    Recombine split items

    1. Split items can only be recombined as long as you are still in the current split bill process, or later, if all parts of the items are returned to the original bill.
    2. Open your Square for Restaurants POS app.
    3. Select the bill containing the items you want to recombine.
    4. Select your item(s) > tap Combine.
    5. Tap Save.

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