Running a small business is hard enough without having to worry about the practicalities of how to record sales and transactions. Square Register is an excellent free POS application designed to take the stress out of managing your business so you can focus on the important nuts and bolts of making your company a success.
Square Register, developed by Square, allows you to manage your business and make sales from your Android device, keeping a full track of sales and inventory. Not only this, but you can manage inventories and look at essential analytics about your business to make it work better.
This is all done from the convenience of your Android device, anytime, anywhere. Square Register is designed to grow with your business and has everything you need to manage transactions from an Android device.
Always be selling
The real selling point of Square Register is the ability to turn your Android device into a point of sale device. You have to request the Square Register Card Reader separately when you sign up, but it’s free for subscribers and allows you to take payments anywhere on your Android device. It’s only available to users in the USA, Canada and Japan at the moment, however.
The point of sale functionality means you don’t need a third-party solution to take payments for your business and it allows you to swipe or key in all major credit cards. Customers can sign directly on your Android device with a light pen.
Square Register allows customers to sign on your Android device.
Handling cash
If a customer pays in cash, gift card, or some other form of tender, you can record this manually into Square Register. Square Register lets you apply discounts and issue refunds to customers.
When it comes to transaction receipts, you can connect your Android device to a receipt printer, although this is obviously not always convenient. Therefore, Square Register has a handy feature that instantly emails or texts receipts to customers. Customers are also given the option to add a tip to every transaction they make using Square Register.
How’s business?
As well as helping you make sales, Square Register tracks sales and provides other useful data on your business. At any time, you can access real-time sales data and look at how the month or year is going from your sales history and see the exact status of your inventory at any given moment.
Square Register comes with its own brand of insights, Square Analytics, which allows you to dig deeper into how your business has been performing. This is all easily accessible from your Square Register dashboard.
You can upload images and add descriptions of any kind to your inventory and update and modify prices as needed. The nice thing is that even if you don’t have an internet connection, Square Register has all of your inventory saved locally and you can continue to take payments. Square Register simply syncs payments and carries them out once you pick up an internet connection again.
So what’s the catch?
Although Square Register is free to use but it should be noted that you will pay a transaction fee of 2.75% per swipe for those cards that are accepted on it (Visa, MasterCard, Discover, and American Express).
There’s a slight delay on deposits, but any transactions made using Square Register should be in your account within 1-2 business days. There are also a few other little niggles such as you can’t issue invoices for payment, resend receipts and, there are some debit cards which Square Register simply won’t accept.
Some users have found that updates to Square Register sometimes cause problems with the point of sale scanner but in most cases customer support is recognized to be speedy and efficient.
Conclusion
Considering Square Register is a free tool, it’s an excellent way to boost your business and process sales, anywhere, anytime on Android.
Square Register is a good solution, but it’s worth exploring some of the other cloud-based point of sale software out there, such as Vend, Booker, and Bindo. Although applications like these tend to command a subscription fee, you’ll find that many offer extra features such as CRM, employee scheduling, and can support a wider variety of card types. Many have tablet and mobile options, too.
