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When you’ve been at Square as long as I have — a little over seven years — you start to see patterns in what the businesses we serve ask for. The feedback we hear shapes everything we do. When I kept hearing the same point of friction from retail shop owners, restaurateurs and salon operators — I wish Square could do this… followed by a request for a feature we had already built. I knew we had an opportunity to improve. We needed to make our existing features, which help streamline workflows, easier to find and use.
That insight sparked the latest updates to Square Point of Sale (POS) and the Square Dashboard app, the control center for Square businesses. We set out to rethink how to help business operators find the features they need without extra effort. Businesses that use Square are often more complex than they appear — they blur the lines between traditional verticals, add new revenue streams, and evolve quickly. The updated Square POS brings all our industry-specific features into one place, so business operators can access what they need, no matter how their operation is set up. And with the latest Square Dashboard app, we curated the most essential back-office tools to make managing administrative tasks on-the-go even easier.
Together, these changes reflect our larger vision: making it as easy as possible for every entrepreneur, from a brand-new food truck owner to a multi-location chain, to run and grow their multifaceted business.
The Square Point of Sale rebuild: Designed with local businesses in mind
For this rebuild, we spent time gathering qualitative and quantitative insights from real businesses, and they told the same story: they were hacking the old app to make it fit their workflows. Someone might’ve wanted table seating but only had access to a standard POS, so they’d write table numbers on receipts by hand. A multi-concept operation might toggle between different Square solutions just to manage their day-to-day. And honestly, we were impressed with a lot of the workarounds people cooked up.
That’s what drove us to rethink the experience. With the new Square POS, you can choose a mode that fits your business and get the features you need from day one.
One app, all the modes you need
We’ve introduced seven modes that are a collection of features and settings tailored to a specific business offering. We offer three modes for food and beverage businesses (full-service, quick-service, and bar), and then modes for retail, services, booking, and a general purpose option. During onboarding, we ask you a few simple questions about your business, then recommend the mode that best fits your dynamic needs.
In full service mode, the layout supports table seating and coursed meals, so a server can easily manage apps, mains, and desserts while coordinating with the kitchen. Bar mode makes it easy to run tabs and assign them to seats or patrons, perfect for venues that take orders quickly and sporadically. Quick-service is closer to a traditional POS layout, designed for speed and simplicity. You might tap pre-set combos for a fast food order or assign a number for pickup or table delivery.
For retailers, the mode focuses on quick checkout and inventory management. A boutique, for example, can process exchanges, look up customer history, and reorder low-stock items right from the POS. Service businesses, such as dog groomers, accountants, or repair techs, can use the services mode to ring up invoices and track client appointments. And for appointment-based businesses like salons, the bookings mode puts the calendar right into the POS, so you can check in a customer, provide the service, and take payment without ever switching apps.
Get started
To get started download the Square Point of Sale app. Sign in to your Square Dashboard and click Settings > Device Management > Modes. You can create and edit modes from your Square Dashboard at any time. You can also customize the Checkout, Security, and Add-on settings of modes from your Square Dashboard or your Square Point of Sale app. Find more information here on how to create and assign modes.
Built-in flexibility for businesses with multiple revenue streams
This flexibility is especially important for multi-concept businesses that don’t neatly fit into one category. Let’s say you’re running a coffee shop by day and a wine bar at night — a pretty common setup where I live in New York. In the old system, you might’ve needed to get creative with your workflow. Now, you can switch between modes depending on your service model by simply navigating to Settings and selecting the desired mode. Most businesses pick one and stick with it, but the flexibility is there for those who need it.
With modes, multi-concept businesses can run all aspects of their operation from the same Square POS app, and the data stays connected. You can create a global catalog or set up location-based catalogs, depending on how your business is structured.
A seamless and fast setup experience
Just as important, we’re setting new Square businesses up for success from the start. In the past, we relied on people to figure out which Square product they needed. Instead of asking you to do your own research, we guide you into the right mode from the beginning. Not only is it intuitive, but it also helps business operators avoid feeling overwhelmed when just starting out. It takes the guesswork out of getting up and running.
Depending on the complexity of the business, it’s possible to go from downloading the app to taking payments in a matter of minutes. Most businesses stick with the mode Square recommends, but it’s always an option to explore or add other modes at any time as the business evolves.
The goal? Give business owners exactly what they need out of the box, while still letting you adapt and evolve. That philosophy is at the heart of everything we’ve built.
A smarter back office with the Square Dashboard
The POS is only one aspect of running a business with Square. We have a web experience called Square Dashboard that is the control center for your business, where business operators can manage their transactions, finances, and team.
We know that you aren’t always by your computer when you need to make critical decisions. We had an existing mobile app version of Square Dashboard that had some key reports, but we saw an opportunity to expand its functionality to help operators manage staff and finances.
We rebuilt the Square Dashboard app to be more comprehensive, pulling in features from our Staff and Banking apps to give owners a clear picture of their business, wherever you are. You can check whether their payments have hit your bank account, view live sales data, and access detailed reporting from your phone. You can see how your staff is doing, adjust hours, and make smart decisions in the moment. Let’s say it’s a slow Tuesday night and you want to end a shift early — now you can do that on the fly.
Payments in your POS, insights in the Dashboard
The Square POS app and the Square Dashboard app are designed to work together, each serving a distinct but complementary role in helping you run your businesses more effectively.
The POS shines at the front of house. It helps businesses take payments and complete tasks efficiently, no matter how complex the business is. From order entry and inventory management to booking services and managing retail exchanges, Square POS is the engine that keeps the day-to-day operations moving.
The Square Dashboard app is the back office. It gives businesses the insight and control to manage everything behind the scenes — tracking performance, monitoring banking activity, managing staff, and making informed decisions in real time.
Together, these tools let complex businesses run, grow, adapt, and optimize. It’s possible to use just Square POS and run the business well. But with Dashboard, business operators can go further and get deeper insights, tighter control, and the confidence to make decisions on the go.
Lorena Cortez, founder and co-owner of The Mellow, a mercantile, cafe, barbershop, and events space with locations in San Francisco’s Mission, Haight, and Union Square districts uses Square POS to manage their complex operation. “We opened two weeks before the pandemic began in 2020, and we’ve been pivoting and expanding ever since. We started as a plant retailer, expanded into home goods, then added the cafe and the barbershop, and now also host workshops and events,” Cortez said.
The new Square Point of Sale makes it easy to manage it all, flow between operations, and deliver a great experience. We have a lot of inventory to manage, and Square makes it easy so our team can receive shipment and expedite our ability to get product on the floor. When it comes to selling, whether a customer is getting a beverage, or a haircut, or a plant, using Square tools lets us focus on the conversation and building a connection.”
Lorena Cortez → Founder and co-owner of The Mellow
Empowering businesses at every stage
Our job at Square is to democratize access to technology. We want businesses of every shape and size to have access to the kinds of tools that were once reserved for large enterprises with big budgets and cumbersome, custom software.
While we do offer paid tiers for more advanced functionalities, the Square POS and Dashboard apps are free to download. You can get started in minutes and scale as you grow. It’s reliable software and hardware, designed to help you focus on what matters most: your customers.
When I’m out during the day, I see Square tools everywhere — at my local cafe, the wine bar down the street, the barbershop on the corner. I love that Square is a part of my neighborhood. I’m always happy to tell people I work here and get their feedback on how we can continue to improve our solutions.
That’s what makes the work we do so meaningful. We’re not just building apps and hardware. We’re helping people run their businesses. These two app redesigns are about simplifying complex operations and making it easier for cherished local businesses of all sizes to get set up quickly and grow smoothly.
