Reporting with Square for Restaurants
With Square for Restaurants, you have access to restaurant-specific reporting to help you track your best selling items, employee sales, and much more. While most of your reporting lives in your Square Dashboard under the Reports tab, you’ll also have access to Live Sales (including open checks) and specialized reports like shift, sales, cash drawer, and close of day reports right in your Square for Restaurants app.
If you are new to Square reporting, check out our Summaries and Reports to help you get started navigating the Square Dashboard.
Check out the full comparison of features between Square for Restaurants Free, Plus and Premium Plans.
In-App Reporting
To view your Restaurants app reports, on iPad tap the Account tab. On Square Register tap Utilities.
Run Shift Report: For employees looking for a running total of sales, open checks, and cash owed to the house.
View Live Sales: With the Live Sales tab, you’ll be able to view the overall performance of your business in real time. Live Sales include open checks (with and without a finalized tip amount), as well as closed checks.
The Live Sales report reflects open checks. To view only finalized sale amounts head to the standard in-app Sales reports below. You can also find the reports in your online Square Dashboard.
View Sales Report: Typically for employees with manager passcode access, the Sales report is a comprehensive overview of the day’s sales organized by category, item, and payment type.
Run Close of Day: The Close of Day report will close out all open checks, remaining cash drawers, and run your service report. You’ll typically only want to run your Close of Day report once your restaurant closes for the night.
Cash Drawer Report: View cash sales and tip out employees using the Paid In/Out feature.
Shift Report
Shift Reports can only be run if any outstanding required tasks have been completed, such as closing all checks or adjusting credit card tips. These tasks can be configured from Devices > Service Settings > Closing Procedures in your online Square Dashboard. Before running your report, you can select Edit report on the report preview page to configure custom dates.
Shift reports are broken up into five main sections:
Shift Summary
The Shift Summary section displays the details on the total time worked by an employee in a given time period.
Tip Details
The Tip Details section breaks down accepted payments and how they impact your employees earned tips.
Cash Sales shows the total cash transactions accepted by an employee.
Non-Cash Tips shows the total tips from credit card transactions accepted by an employee.
Cash Owed to You is used for businesses that pay out credit card tips in cash at the end of a shift. This number will represent the value of credit card tips that are over the cash accepted by this employee.
Cash Owed to House will show the amount of cash an employee should have in their bank after paying themselves tips.
If you have the Declare cash tips option turned on within the Shifts section of your Dashboard, team members can declare cash tips from the Shift report without clocking out. Tracking cash tips requires a subscription to Square for Restaurants Plus. Declared cash tips will also appear in the Shift report preview and in the Shift report itself.
Read more about declaring cash tips and tip pooling with timecard management for team members.
Sales Summary
The Sales Summary section details the total covers and total dollar amount collected from those covers during your employees shift.
Category Sales
Category Sales displays the number of items in each of your categories that your employee sold during their shift.
Item Sales
Item Sales shows the number of individual items sold by your employee during their shift.
Live Sales in App
Overview: A quick view of all closed checks, open checks, and their combined value.
Open Check Details: View all open checks, total amount, average total amount, and total covers.
To view your Live Sales report in app:
Tap on Account.
From the list of reports, select View Live Sales.
From here you’ll be able to review a detailed breakdown for all closed and open checks — including the number of checks, gross dollar amount, average check amount, and covers.
Dashboard Reporting
You can find a suite of advanced reporting tools in the Reports tab of your online Square Dashboard.
Your Sales Summary report gives you a high-level view of sales for a given time period. You can view the broad-stroke performance of your restaurants by taking a look at the graph representations, or drill down further by filtering by location, employee or menu.
Keep in mind: When you have Reopen and Keep Payment Method enabled in your Service Settings online, you can adjust the payment amount before finalizing sales by running your Close of Day report. However, since payments are not finalized — including cash payments — transactions will reflect as pending in your online Square Dashboard. When Reopen and Keep is enabled, checks with unsettled tips will not be included in your Dashboard reports or the reports in-app.
To view all checks including pending checks with unsettled tips, filter the report to see all checks. From this view, the Sales Summary report includes open checks and closed checks.
Live Sales on Dashboard
Access your Live Sales report on the Square Dashboard from a computer, tablet, or your mobile phone browser. To get started:
From your Dashboard, click Reports > Checks.
Filter by Open Checks, Closed Checks, or All Checks for the specified period of time.
Note: This filter applies to all relevant data (tables, sales, number of transactions, etc.) and can be seen in the following reports: Sales Summary, Sales Trends, Item Sales, Category Sales, Section Sales, Team Sales, Labor vs Sales, Discounts, Modifier Sales, Taxes, and Service Charges.
Generate Reports and Apply Filters
In addition to the basic summary, you can organize and generate several different reports to view various data sets: sales trends, payment methods, items, categories, sections, or individual employees. Each report contains a toolbar of customizable options — so you can refine your reports and filter your view online.
For example: You can customize your Item Sales report to see how many BLT sandwiches were sold at 4 of your 6 restaurant locations in the last 6 weeks, specifically during dinner service.
Category Rollup Reporting
When you create a Category Rollup, you’ll be able to group and view the sales for several categories at once. Category Rollups are visible from your Category Sales and Item Sales reports online, and will also display on your in-app Employee Shift and Close of Day reports.
For example: If you have three item categories (Liquor, Beer, and Wine), you can create a Category Rollup Alcohol to review the performance of all three categories. You can also apply additional filters on the Category Sales report (such as date, time of day, and employee) to help you drill down further into your item sales.
Just make sure you’ve set up item categories online first.
To get started:
From your online Square Dashboard, head to Reporting > Reports > Category Sales.
Click Rollups.
Select multiple item categories. When you’re all set, tap Create a Category Rollup.
Keep in mind, although you’ll see your Category Rollups for both online and in-app category reports, you will not see a change to your item layout or menu display on the Restaurants app. Rollups are for reporting purposes only.
Once you create your Category Rollup, you can apply your new filters to your Item Sales report.
Reporting by Ordering Partner
If you use multiple ordering channels with Square for Restaurants, you can filter transaction history or reports by Source.
To filter your reports by source:
Head to your online Square Dashboard > Reports.
In the Display By and Filter By sections of your reports, you’ll see the option to update your reporting view by Source.
Click Export to save or print your report.
To filter your transactions by source:
Head to your online Square Dashboard > Select Transactions.
Click the Source filter at the top of the page to select specific sources.
Once you apply the Source filter, you can combine other filters, such as Locations, Employees, or timeframe to drill down and customize your reporting view.
Export Your Reports
Square for Restaurants allows you to export a CSV file directly to your desktop or send reports to connected accounting software.
To download a custom report:
Go to the report you’d like to export.
Click Export Report in the upper right corner.
Select CSV or the accounting app connected to your Square Account.
Your report will automatically download to your computer or send directly to the connected accounting app.
Learn more about Square for Restaurants reporting — including customizing your closing procedures, Shift Reports, and your Close of Day report.