Starting with Square (Blog post from February 2013)

January 1st 2013 we began using Square Register.  Getting to this point was a long journey which took about a year.  In this blog entry I will discuss my experiences and thought process that led us to use Square.

It has been one month since we started with Square register.  So far it has been great, with a few issues.  We had about an hour one day when Square would not take credit cards and since there is no customer service to call we had to wait.  Luckily I know other business owners who use square and after contacting one I found out it was a system problem.  We lost a few customers but we had similar  issues with our old system.  Not a big deal.

One continuing issue is that the credit card reader does not always work.  We use all the old tricks to try to get the reader to work but on occasion nothing helps.  In this case, the card number has to be manually entered.  Square treats a manually entered card just as if the customer used Square Wallet and charges me an additional 3.5%.  Basically I get charged extra when their equipment does not work the way it should work.  Probably the most effective thing we did to manage this issue was to use a different card reader.

At this point, the positive sides to Square seem to outweigh the negatives.  Customers love our new IPad set up and when asked about I tell people we leapt three decades into the future when we switched.  Our old system was an old school register with a merchant credit card machine.  Keeping track of data used to mean a lot of manual entering and lots of time wasted.  Now we have lots of data  at our fingerprints without having spent thousands of dollars for a POS system.