Settle payments and manage tips
About payments and tipping
After you’ve completed a payment on Square Point of Sale with a signed receipt, you can settle the transaction and record the final payment amount. There are two options for settling your payments:
Add tips and settle transactions individually
Bulk settle multiple transactions
You can also customize your settings to accept tips electronically or on a printed receipt. You’ll be able to view all tip amounts from your payment history.
Before you begin
You have 36 hours to add a tip and settle the transaction. After 36 hours, all unsettled payments will be automatically settled with a $0 tip. Once a payment has been settled, the tip amount can’t be adjusted.
At the moment, you’re unable to use sign and tip on printed receipts with contactless (NFC) payments. Sign and tip on printed receipts cannot be used to pre-authorize or verify funds on a payment card.
If you’re using Square to manage your team, team members can only settle payments they’ve processed by default, and tips will be attributed to the team member that processed the payment.
Settled sign and tip payments will be included in your next transfer following your transfer schedule. They’ll also appear as completed in your in-app and online sales history and will be included in your Transactions CSV.
Step 1: Enable tipping
You can set up and customize tipping preferences on your Point of Sale.
From the navigation bar at the bottom of your screen, tap ≡ More.
Tap Settings > Checkout > Tipping.
Toggle on Collect Tips and select between showing your tip options on the signature screen or on a separate screen.
Choose Smart Tip Amounts or Set Percentage Amounts. See Step 2 for detailed information.
Choose to Allow Custom Amounts.
If Allow Custom Amounts is enabled and the preset amounts are all set to 0%, Square Point of Sale will hide these amounts and display only the Custom Tip Amount and No Tip options.-
Choose to display a Separate Tipping Screen.
If you choose to display a Separate Tipping Screen, your customers can select a tip after the payment has processed.
If you opt not to display a Separate Tipping Screen, tipping options will be shown on the signature screen.
Step 2: Customize tip settings
When Smart Tip Amounts is enabled, tipping works as follows:
- If a transaction is less than $10, the available tipping options are: No Tip, $1, $2 or $3.
- For a transaction $10 or more, the available tipping options are: No Tip, 15%, 20% or 25%.
Enabling custom tip amounts allows you to set three custom amounts, which you can adjust at any time. To create custom tipping amounts:
- Tap Set Percentage Amounts within your tipping settings.
- Tap each amount field to enter your custom percentage.
- To allow your customers to enter a tip amount of their choosing, toggle on Allow Custom Amounts.
Note: Setting your fixed percentage amounts to 0% will only give your customers the ability to enter a custom tip amount.
Depending on the size of your sale, the maximum custom tip limits are as follows:
- If a transaction is below $3, then the maximum custom tip amount is $3.
- If a transaction is over $3, then the maximum custom tip amount can be up to 100% of the transaction.
- If a transaction is over $200, then the maximum custom tip amount can be up to 50% of the transaction, up to $1,000.
Step 2: Enable sign and tip on receipts
After you’ve connected and configured your device to a compatible receipt printer, you can enable sign and tip from your Point of Sale:
From the main navigation bar, tap ≡ More.
Tap Settings > Checkout > Signature & Receipt.
Toggle on Collect Signature > select Sign on Printed Receipt.
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Choose the receipt format: Traditional or Quick Tip receipts.
The Traditional Receipt has a tip, total and signature line, allowing your customers to leave a custom tip amount.
With a Quick Tip receipt, customers choose from three tip options by simply checking a box.
To automatically print a customer copy of the authorization slip, toggle on Print Additional Auth Slip.
Go back to Settings > Checkout > Tipping > toggle on Collect Tips.
Select either Smart Tip Amounts or Set Percentage Amounts. You can also toggle on Allow Custom Amounts to let your customers write in a custom tip.
Signature & receipt settings are specific to the account they’re associated with and not the device. So if you update the settings on one device, the updates will affect all other devices logged in to the same account.
Step 4: Settle payments with tips
- From the main navigation bar, tap Transactions.
- Payments awaiting settlement will have a clock icon.
- Tap a payment and enter the tip amount. Note: If you’re using Quick Tip, select from the tip options you’ve enabled. If you’re using Traditional Tip, manually enter the tip amount for each payment.
- Tap Add > Settle $ Total.
Step 5: View payments awaiting tips
To view payments awaiting settlement:
Sign in to your Square Dashboard and click Reporting > Transactions.
From the banner at the top of the page, you’ll see the total number of unsettled payments.
Click View Transactions to see a full list. Once you’ve added tips and settled payments, these payments will appear in your Transactions CSV.
Note: You can view payments awaiting tips from your Square Dashboard, but these payments can only be settled from the Square app.