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Checkout your customer with the Square Retail POS app

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Who is this article for?
This article is for retail owners and team members with checkout permissions and a Square for Retail Free, Plus or Premium subscription who are checking out a customer in the Square Retail POS app. Learn more about custom permissions with Square.

About customer checkout

In the Square Retail POS app you can access the Checkout tab from the main menu. Once you’ve finished building your customer’s cart, you can checkout your customer and complete the sale. Checkout is where you can build your cart and accept your customer’s payment.

Before you begin

Adding items to cart: If you need to learn more about adding and removing items, scanning an item’s GTIN number, or saving your customer’s cart for later, check out the Support article Build your customer’s cart in the Square Retail POS app.

Sales tax: Once you’ve created taxes from your Square Dashboard, you can apply sales tax or any other applicable tax to item sales. Taxes can be location-specific or applied across multiple locations. Review Create and manage your sales tax settings for detailed instructions on setup and editing your tax settings.

Discounts: In order to add a discount to your cart, first make sure you’ve created one from your Square Dashboard or from the Items tab in your Square Retail POS app. Review Create and manage discounts to learn how to create automatic discounts for specific items and categories, holiday specials, or limited time offers.

Discounts

All discounts (cart or item level) automatically default to show the item level on your customer’s printed and digital receipts, providing transparency to buyers on how much each item costs. Item-level discounts will always be itemized on receipts. Also your cashiers can clearly see how much a returned item is worth, expediting the return process.

Add a discount to the total sale in the Retail POS app

Once you’ve created discounts, you can add them to sales:

  1. Open the Retail POS app and tap Checkout.
  2. Tap Discounts from your Shortcuts. You can also tap Search > Discounts.
  3. Select a discount to add it to the cart. If applicable, tap Apply Discount.
  4. Your cart will be updated with the discount amount applied on all of the items in your cart.
  5. If the discount amount hasn’t been defined, you can tap the discount in your cart to edit it.

You can remove a discount from the total sale by swiping left and tapping the trash can icon.

Add discounts to individual items in the Retail POS app

  1. Open the Retail POS app and tap Checkout.
  2. Add items to the cart.
  3. Tap the item you would like to sell at a discount.
  4. Toggle on Discounts and check the discount(s).
  5. Tap Save > Save changes.
  6. Tap Charge to complete the sale.

You can remove discounts from an item by toggling off Discounts.

Edit discount settings from Square Dashboard

You can choose whether cart-level discounts appear as itemized or are simply totaled on your customer’s receipts.

  1. Sign in to your Square Dashboard and click Account & Settings > Business information > Receipts.
  2. Under Items and total, toggle ON/OFF Show total savings row when more than one discount is applied.
    3.Toggle ON/OFF Show cart-level discounts on the item level for your itemized cart-level discounts preference.

Collect tips

To give your customers the option to add a tip to their total, enable tipping from the device profile assigned to the device in your Square Dashboard. Learn how to Create and manage device profiles.

To enable tipping on an existing device:

  1. Sign in to your Square Dashboard and click Settings > Device Management > Profiles > Device profiles.

  2. Click the device profile assigned to a Retail POS app you'd like to enable tipping on.

  3. Click Manage under Settings.

  4. Click Tipping and toggle on Collect Tips.

  5. Set your tipping preferences:

    • When the Smart tip amounts setting is turned on, 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%.

    • When the Set percentage amounts setting is turned on, you can set three custom amounts (which you can adjust at any time.)

    • Select how you'd like to Calculate tip: After taxes or Before taxes.

  6. When you’re all set, click Save.

To enable tipping on your device from the Retail POS app, tap ≡ More > Settings > Checkout > Tipping > toggle ON Collect Tips.

Related articles

Review the following Support Center articles to optimize the checkout process for your customers and staff:


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