If your council allows it and you haven't yet signed up for Square, you can use this link to score both of us $1,000 worth of fee-free processing.
When you finish setting up your account, you can also request a free reader so you can be ready for cookie season! I use different team members with my own troop, and was mailed a free reader for each email address I set up. We can now run multiple simultaneous booths without conflicts.
You can use the instructions below to setup your Square to make it easier to use for booths and personal sales, and also to be able to filter results to track payments:
Customizing your Referral Link
If you'd like to change the code on the end of your referral link so that you don't have to look it up each time, you can do so in the Account Settings of your Square setup. First, click on the menu icon in the upper left corner, then choose "Account & Settings" from the menu:
From the Account section, click on "Get Free Processing". Your current link name is listed in the gray box. You can click the Customize button to change it to something more useful to you.
Side note: This is also the screen where you'll come to redeem any rewards you have earned from having other people use your link. Before you can get your free processing, you need to click the blue "Redeem Now" button and select the free processing choice. You can use as many of that choice as you want, but you can only use the discount toward a chip reader once ever.
Setting up your Cookie Flavors and Pricing:
The next thing you'll want to do is set up all of your cookies in your item library. Start by clicking the menu icon in the upper left corner and choosing Items:
On this next screen, you'll use the "Create an Item" button to add a button for each cookie flavor along with any donation or Gift of Caring buttons you may want.
The only things you need to enter in the Create an Item window are the Name of the item and the price. I think it's also helpful to add an image because it makes it easier to use once you're in the app to make a sale.
Side note: Using an image with a background color that matches the boxes helps the girls (and adults) select the right cookie flavors when running a Square sale. If you use Little Brownie Baker, I have a set I use personally saved here: LBB Square Cookie Icons
Once you have them all set up, it'll look something like this in the Android app:
Setting up separate logins for families and/or booths:
This is super important for being able to track individual payments back to where they came from. By setting up separate Team Members for each family/girl and booth kit, you can balance your cookie money much more easily. With my troop, we set up 2 email addresses for each booth kit so that we can toggle between them. That way when we have back-to-back booths at the same location, the second group of people coming in use a different Square login and we can tell which booth window the electronic payments belong to. Then we put the email address and password for the different starting times in the lid of the cash box.
Square recently changed how they set up their multiple email addresses from "Mobile Employees" to "Team Members" and it changed how things show up in the Reports. Now if you want to filter by who took the payment, your options are by Location and by Device. Since you can only use each Device ID once, that won't work in the booth boxes. So our troop is doing everything via Locations that are attached to Team Members.
The instructions are the same whether you're setting up a new family login or a booth setup.
First thing to do is to get the email address for each Square Location that you want to set up. For the booth setup, you'll want to create a free email account (gmail works great) for each location you want to track. If you allow your families to take electronic payments on their individual orders, you'll need to get the email address of the adult in charge to configure them and send the invitation. Once you have the email address, you need to set up a Location and a Team Member for them. Location should be done first. You get there from the menu icon, and go to "Account & Settings":
Under "Business", choose "Locations". Then you can click the "Create Location" button:
When creating your new Location, there are 4 things that you need to fill out:
- Nickname: This is your internal label for your location. I prefix mine with either Booth or Family so that I know if this is a personal girl sale vs one of our booth setups.
- Location Type: Set this to "Mobile Location".
- Transfer Account: Set this to your main Troop bank account. I have no idea why that isn't the default... so make sure you do this.
- Location: This will import all of the Items and Pricing from the main item library. Choose the one that was set up for your account.
Side note: The Location Business Name will already be filled out from when you created your Square account. Leave this alone. It's what shows up on your customer's bill.
After you create the unique location, you need to create the Team Member in Square to attach that to, and set the permissions. Start by going to the Menu Icon and choosing "Team":
Check the Permissions section to make sure that your Team Permissions are set to Mobile Points of Sale.
Then go back up to the Team Members section and click on Create Team Member:
In this next box, fill out the top four boxes and click Save.
It will drop back out to the main Team page, and you'll need to scroll down on the right to get to the Complete Setup button:
This pops up a box where you need to pick their title. Just use "Team Member" and hit Save.
Once you have them set as a Team Member, you'll drop back out to the Teams screen again and you'll need to scroll further down to see the "Set up permissions" button. Click that.
Make sure the top box is set for "Team Permissions", which will make the Locations box show up. Change the Locations box to only have their unique location in it then hit save.
Side note: You can accidentally assign someone to multiple locations really easily. Take care to make sure they only have the one.
Once you complete that setup, it will email the person to invite them to download the Square app and login. They should setup their password and login using the email address they originally provided. I highly recommend having them log in and go to the Settings menu and scroll to the bottom. They should change their Device Name to something useful. This is a secondary way to track/filter something just in case someone didn't log out properly between personal and booth sales. The bottom of the settings page is also where they'll see the name of their location (which tells at a glance if they're still on their personal login vs the booth login) and it's where they'll find the sign out button for switching between accounts:
Android app looks like this:
Filtering the Transactions Report:
Once you have all the setup done and have started taking payments, you can filter the Transactions report by location, date, time, etc. to breakdown the payments for recording in the cookie portal software.
Side note: You can also choose to export everything to Excel and sort and filter there if it's easier.
