How to simplify your employee management workflow with Square.

Your guide to managing your team, payroll,
performance, and more.

From scheduling shifts to running payroll, managing your team can add a lot of work to your actual work. As an employer, having a centralized employee management system can help you keep track of timecards, schedule shifts more easily, simplify your payroll process, and improve employee engagement. Employee management tools and scheduling software can help you spend less time on administrative tasks and more time focused on your company. When you use Square Point of Sale to run your business, you can add more employee management tools based on what your business needs. Square tools sync timecards with payroll, tips, and commissions, help you track employee performance and labor costs, and more.

In this guide, we’ll cover how you can manage your team more effectively and optimize your business with Square’s employee management tools.

Get your team set up.

Once you’ve gotten started with Square POS, you can set up your team. Team Management is flexible to meet the needs of organizations of all sizes. If your team is small, you might want to add team members right from your POS app. If your team is larger or more complex, you might want to first create permission sets and job titles in Dashboard. For all businesses, three things to consider when setting up your team are permission sets, adding team members, and POS access. This will help you create a seamless employee management system and make scheduling, time tracking, timecard reporting, payroll, and performance measurement easy in the future.

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Create permission sets

Businesses typically use permission sets by organizational hierarchy, like managers and team members, or by role, like cashiers and baristas. For example, managers might have the ability to view sales reports while cashiers might just be able to issue refunds or update customer profiles. Permission sets provide necessary security, in addition to simplifying management and tracking for you and the organization as a whole.

Add your team members

Now that you’ve created permissions sets, you can add team members, give them a job title, and update their wage information. If you include their email address, they’ll be able to use the mobile Team app to view their schedule, clock in and out, and more. This information will integrate with your POS, scheduling, timecard reporting, payroll, and analytics—so you can see everything in one place.

Keep your POS secure

If you have several employees, it’s important to know who’s doing what. Once you assign team members to the appropriate permissions set, you can create a unique passcode for each employee to log into your POS. Passcodes allow employees to clock in and out, and ensure they only access the tools they need within your POS.

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Make scheduling shifts and time tracking easy for you and your employees.

Managing employee scheduling can be a logistical challenge, especially if you’re using multiple systems or keeping track of everything with a pen and paper. With Square’s employee scheduling software, you can create weekly schedules in your Dashboard and send them out digitally. A single, centralized system lets everyone know their work schedule, helps fill open shifts faster, and lets employees swap shifts easily.

Schedule shifts without the hassle

Square’s scheduling software makes shift scheduling easy. Team members can set their availability in the Team app, so you can easily assign shifts, build out your weekly schedule, and set clear expectations with your team about their work schedules.

If you have a shift you’d like to open up to your team, you can create Open Shifts and specify which job titles can pick it up. Then you can send an automated notification to your team via email or the Team app.

Improve your employees’ experience

When you use Square for employee scheduling, your team can use the Team app to update their availability, view their work schedule, pick up open shifts, trade shifts with other team members, and clock in and out right from the mobile app. The Team app gives your team more flexibility and helps drive employee engagement.

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Sync timecards with your payroll run

Avoid the hassle of manually transferring timecards into your payroll run. Team Management integrates with Square Payroll, so you can import your team’s timecards, tips, and commissions right into your payroll system. We’ll dive deeper into how you can simplify payroll next.

Streamline your payroll process.

Integrating timecards with payroll is the best way to streamline and automate your employee management workflow, especially if employees are paid with commissions or tips. Square Payroll syncs your timecards, automates tax filings, and lets you offer employee benefits easily from one place. And when you manage your business with Square, you can pay your team faster and get more control over your cash flow.

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Handle commissions and tips easily

If your business pays employees a commission based on their sales, you can assign a unique commission rate to each team member, or set a flat commission rate for your whole team. Easily pull reports to track weekly or monthly commissions by each team member.

If your business accepts tips, your POS will track them for you so you can easily import them into your payroll run. Tips will be paid directly to the employee the tip is associated with, or pooled or split among employees based on hours worked.

Pay your team faster

Instant Payments lets you pay your team directly from your Square balance instead of your bank account. Your team will receive their pay instantly when they use Cash App or as soon as the next business day with direct deposits. That way you’ll have more control over when you pay your team and you won’t have to wait for bank transfers to go through.

Give employees more flexibility

Sometimes, employees might want to be paid earlier. On-Demand Pay gives eligible team members early access to a portion of their paycheck before the pay period is over. This flexibility can help drive employee engagement and promote a positive company culture. Square manages all the back-end accounting, so employees can get paid when they need it without creating an extra hassle for you.

Offer employee benefits easily

Offering employee benefits is a great way to recruit and retain employees, and you don’t need a big HR department to do it. Square partners with benefits providers to make it easy for you to offer employees health insurance, 401(k) plans, worker’s compensation, and more—all from your Square account.

Once you’re set up, benefits providers will take care of the rest, from employee enrollment to calculating deductions and contributions for each pay run. We work with your employees directly to manage their benefits, so you can focus on running your business.

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Track your team’s performance and labor costs.

Like in any other part of your business, tracking productivity and labor costs will help you make smarter management decisions. Square’s employee management software automatically creates detailed labor and sales reports to help you make real-time decisions about your team and optimize your labor costs.

Analyze labor costs

Compare hourly labor costs and net sales in one report so you can optimize your shift scheduling to make sure you’ve got the right number of employees working at all times.

Identify top performers

Team sales reports make it easy to track productivity. Filter sales by location and team member, identify top employees, and see who might benefit from a little coaching.

Monitor your team’s POS activity

Get a clear view of employee activities and see actions, like refunds, discounts, and voided transactions, taken by each individual employee through the Activity Log.

Customize with third-party apps and APIs.

Square integrates with third-party software you might already use for payroll and business operations. And Square APIs let you develop more customized solutions that are perfect for your business.

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