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How are others that price by a decimal quantities working their charges?

We sell our farm's meat and poultry at farmer's markets, on farm and by delivery, and price mostly by the pound.  I'd love to have the ability to set the quantity to a decimal input, so I can enter the weight on the package meat and be able to have a set price on the item, but that is still not available.  So most of our items are just "variable" pricing, and I have to have a calculator in one hand, or go to back and forth from the calculator app on my phone to Square, to calculate the price on all our beef and pork.  The only other option I've been told is to set a price for .01 or .001 lb, and enter the decimal amount in as a whole number.  So if a Pork Shoulder Roast is $8.00/lb, and weights are in tenths, like 2.78 lbs, I'd have to set the price for the item as $.08 and input the quantity as 278, since it only takes whole numbers.  This seems like an expensive accident just waiting to happen.  And trying to explain why I have to do this to customers, and how it would show up on their receipts, just doesn't seem worth it, even if it would save time not having to calulate everything while inputing.  Are their any other farmers, butchers, or others who price by decimal quantities doing it this way successfully?  If so, do customers care?

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Best Answer

Square now offers the ability to charge decimal quantities. Start by visiting Items in Dashboard, then set the unit type. You can choose from a list of preset units, such as pounds, ounces, and feet.

 

You can also choose to add your own custom unit — in whole number or decimal quantities. Learn more here

 

 

Justin
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@dnmair - Appreciate the feedback, and I completely understand where you're coming from! I can personally assure you that this discussion has been sent over to our product liaison team (as well as the feedback we've heard from phone calls/ emails). While I can't offer any sort of timeframe, this is certainly something that's on our radar.

 

Thanks for your patience, and I'll be sure to update this thread if I hear any other details on the topic. 


Sean
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Product Manager | Square, Inc.
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So, Sean, I guess I'm going on the adage of the squeeky wheel here, and hoping there may be some progress on this issue.  Has there been any work done on implementing decimal quantities yet so many of us can get out of Variable hell?  (OK, I'm being dramatic, there, but it is a pain in the rear.)

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@FarmMom - I don't have any sort of updates to share. 😕  Having said that, I have definitely funneled everyones' feedback.


Sean
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Product Manager | Square, Inc.
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I also am a service provider and charge in partial hour increments. I started the thread listed below a year ago and before that had been on the phone with tech support for another year asking for help implementing partial quantities. The advice was to create items for each single possible partial hour quantity. Since I have numerous services that each could possibly range from 15 minutes to 6 hours in 1/4 hour increments, you can see how huge of a task it was to set up these inventory items. Not to mention how weird it looks on an otherwise professional computer IT invoice to have all these bits of things listed. I used to work in database programming, not sure what the problem is here but according to Square it's seemingly unsurmountable. Unfortunately for them, it's hugely limiting what is otherwise an awesome app and marketshare of small vendors.

https://www.sellercommunity.com/t5/General-Discussion/Can-you-enter-partial-quantities-for-Invoices/...

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I completely agree. I'm a web developer and I know for a fact that something like this would be extremely easy to integrate. Not sure what the hold up is. It's absolutely astonishing that something as simple as this still hasn't been implemented after this many years.

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I have a work around for you! Especially as a service provider who potentially has clients. I have discovered the beauty and organizational ease that is Dubsado! Your first 3 clients are free after that it's $20 a month which I honestly think is well worth the cost for everything it does.

 

Create lead funnels, proposals, contracts, and invoices all in one place. Their invoicing ALLOWS DECIMALS and guess what, it processes through Square but VIA their own system. BOOM. Best answer that's yet to be provided at a low cost with a multitude of other perks and you can charge clients however you **bleep** well operate your business. Hallelujah companies that GET IT!

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SO necessary...please. I REALLY do not want to migrate from Square. PLEASE allow billing by fractional hours.

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I have a work around for you! Especially as a service provider who potentially has clients. I have discovered the beauty and organizational ease that is Dubsado! Your first 3 clients are free after that it's $20 a month which I honestly think is well worth the cost for everything it does.

 

Create lead funnels, proposals, contracts, and invoices all in one place. Their invoicing ALLOWS DECIMALS and guess what, it processes through Square but VIA their own system. BOOM. Best answer that's yet to be provided at a low cost with a multitude of other perks and you can charge clients however you **bleep** well operate your business. Hallelujah companies that GET IT!

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I sell fabric to the nearest 1/8 yard. I, too, need decimals. I entered 50 different variables for 1/8 yard up to 5 yards at 1/8 intervals.....for $1/yard-$12/yard. UGH.

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I asked for this feature 1.5 years ago and they still have not added it.  I got the same canned reply back then that it was on their product team's radar and should be implemented soon.  I doubt much has changed.

 

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I have been asking about this for a couple years as well.  As soon as they actually had call-in support I called about it.  I'm glad to see the forum actually has someone responding.  I love using Square, and love implementing the improvements as they happen, and when this finally gets fixed it will make selling at the farmer's markets so much faster!  I thought I was all along, or maybe it was just a meat thing.  Never dreamed it was also time and lenths (were there other units?), not just weight,  that were charged by decimals.

 

This fix will make a big time savings for us not just on the front end of sales, which takes a while when having to calculate each package of beef or pork before entering it as variable.  It also will save time in bookkeeping not having to back out each sale to figure weights out.

 

Please figure this one out soon!  

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thanks

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There are several threads about this.  At this time, there is no ability to enter decimal quantities.  I've been asking for this for a couple years.  We sell meat at farmer's markets, and all items priced by weight I have to calculate separately and enter as a "variable" price.  And it's not just those pricing by weight, but also by time (fractions of an hour) and also by lenght, like fabric by the yard.  I really hope they make this functional soon.  Why is it so hard to program a decimal quantity instead of just a whole number?

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Is the smallest weight you sell .25 of a pound?  and do you always sell say 1/4, 1/2, 3/4  1lb ?

Maybe you can price the item in your system by the 1/4 pound, so if someone buys  1  1/4 pounds, then you just click on the 1/4 pound for that meat and select 5 of them?

 

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@GCM, I moved your thread over to this one that shares some similar questions and concerns. @RCT, that's a good work around, thanks for sharing.

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If you read through the post of this thread you'll see there are a LOT of us that have been requesting the ability to have a  decimal quanitity for several years now.  It's applicable to measurements in length, like for your fabric, weight, like our meat that we sell by the pound, and time, which is often billed in fractions of an hour.  It is the biggest frustration for me, personally, about Square.  We don't seem to ever get any kind of answer that this is truly being worked on, either!  I do hope this can be resolved soon.  I see all kinds of special things offered for appointment booking, and I'm offered loans based on our Square usage, but this is the biggest functional problem I have when I'm at the farmer's market.  I'm still having to hold a calculator along with my phone to ring up the meat orders.

 

So, for us, we just set up all our meat items that are priced per pound, as variable, and enter the price after calculating it.  I don't think the workaround that Square suggests, of pricing by the hundredth or thousandth of a pound and entering the digital weight without the decimal, to be feasible.  I just see that as more confusing for the customer and a error waiting to happen.  It would be even harder to do this with yard fracations, I'd think, unless you priced by the 1/4 or 1/8th of a yard, but it would still be confusing, I'd think.

 

So, Square Team!  What progress is being made to make decimal quantities available?

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I'm with you! Square looks so much better branded and more synonymous with my work but unfortunately because of the inability to bill by decimal quantities for my time, I continue to have to use PayPal for all of my invoicing. It's a real bummer that a company that speaks to small businesses and entrepreneurs honestly has no one watching these comments and responding to their community. We are asking for you to respond and getting crickets in return, for YEARS. What's going to happen if I ever had a real problem and this is the impression I have of your responsiveness on a basic request.

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We are having trouble selling fabric because it is cut in half yards and other fractions.  Can anyone think of a way to deal with this as a price point?  

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Sorry I don't have an answer, but we are having the same issue. I will keep looking and let you know if I find anything.

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I'm recommending everyone go to the page that has their "solution" select that the article was not useful and leave a comment requesting decimal pricing. If everyone does this in a short amount of time, maybe, but entirely doubtful, that could finally get some eyes on it.

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This is a desperately needed feature that any one working in service/contracting industries needs. I have only just started with square having switched from paypal, and was astounded that i was unable to enter a 1.5hr transaction, and to suggest that we use items for partial hours is ludicrous, I can just see the look on my clients faces as they try to decipher their receipts. So at this point we will simply enter the total value and not itemise at all and invoice seperately, which of course leaves us much more vulnerable to errors, with staff having to double enter into a calculator, but it appears this is our only option. We will run with this for a couple of months to see how it works for us, but in all honesty this could be a deal breaker. An expected time frame for this upgrade is essential rather than the standard answer of it being in the system. 

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