Square analytics: what the built-in reports show, and what they cannot

What Square already does well

Square's own reporting covers the transaction side properly, and for a lot of day-to-day questions it is the right place to look. Sales by day and by period, item and category performance, payment and refund detail, and — where you run scheduling and timecards through Square — hours and labor against those sales.

If a question is about what rang through the register, the answer is generally already there. It is worth learning those reports well before reaching for anything else.

Where the reporting necessarily stops

Square can only report on what passes through Square. That is not a gap in the product; it is the boundary of what it observes. Most of what determines whether a week was profitable does not pass through a point of sale at all:

• Rent, insurance, utilities and the rest of your fixed costs
• Supplier invoices — what the ingredients in a sold item actually cost
• Inventory counts, spoilage and waste
• Payroll paid outside Square, and employer taxes and benefits
• Anything that currently lives in a spreadsheet

The questions that fall in the gap

Because those costs sit outside, the questions that need both sides cannot be answered from sales data alone. Every one of these needs the register and something else at the same time:

• Which location loses the most margin, and how much of the gap is labor
• Which menu items keep the least of each dollar they earn
• Whether waste is trending up, and which standing order is causing it
• Where revenue actually goes once rent and fixed costs are taken out
• Whether last week was genuinely worse, or just shorter

Why exporting to a spreadsheet only half works

The usual answer is to export a CSV and reconcile it by hand against invoices and payroll. It does work, and it is how most operators get their real numbers. The problem is that it works once.

The reconciliation has to happen again every week, it happens after the week it describes has ended, and the moment it becomes tedious it stops happening at all. A number you compute quarterly cannot change a Thursday schedule.

What closing the gap requires

Answering across that line takes three things, and none of them are exotic: read Square continuously rather than at export time, hold the costs Square cannot see somewhere consistent, and put both in the same weekly frame so they can be compared without a manual join.

Fixed costs you tell the system once. Invoices and payroll arrive as files. The point of sale supplies the rest — and the useful questions become answerable because both halves finally sit in one place.

Where figuno fits

This is the gap figuno was built for. It reads your Square account — sales, items, staff hours, inventory — takes your spreadsheets and the fixed costs Square never sees, and answers questions across all of it in plain language, weekly.

The Square connection is read-only. figuno cannot write, refund or edit anything in your register, and nothing about how you take payments changes. Setup runs about ten minutes, and the first three months are free.