I operate an art gallery and we do a lot of layaway purchases. Here's my workaround:
After calculating the total and the deposit due, I ring the item/items and manually change the price to reflect the deposit amount. For each item I use the Note function to indicate it's a layaway deposit. I then make an invoice that splits the remaining balance into equal thirds or fourths depending on the customer's choice. We set a reminder for 2 days prior, and the day of each payment due date. The paper agreement says we prefer they use the online invoice function. If they do happen to come in to make an in-person payment, I create an item for the amount and use the Notes to indicate what it's for. Since we're a consignment gallery, and artists are paid as each payment comes in, having the invoice record helps our accounts to ensure commission payments are made correctly.
Re: How can I offer my customers a layaway option with Square Point of Sale?
Posted
04-01-2016
Great question, @wh! We don't have a specific layaway feature, but we have had some sellers use our open tickets feature to facilitate layaway sales. The workaround goes like this:
1) Create an open ticket for the item
2) When the customer makes a payment on the item, close out the existing open ticket with their payment
3) Then create a new open ticket with the updated balance
4) Follow this process until the item has been paid off
You could also create an Invoice for the upfront partial payment and more Invoices for the balance until the goods are picked up. Here’s how to create Invoices: http://squ.re/1SGkd8s.
Thank you @theprimitivewil! I also appreciate the information about how this would help your business, that's really useful for the Point of Sale team who are working on new features and improvements. We'll let you know about any updates in this thread.
I don’t understand how you use George’s workaround. If I pick the item, say the cost is $100, your saying take the payment for $25.00 and close out ticket and open new ticket for $75.00.
Using the first ticket with the item for $100, customer pays $25.00 cash, pull up ticket put $25.00 under cash, how do I close out this ticket (where do I apply the $75.00 balance to close out first ticket)?
When opening up 2nd open ticket for $75.00 wouldn’t this double my sales depending on how first ticket was handeled?
Sorry for the confusion around this, as you're not able to completely close out an open ticket until the full balance is paid off.
You'd either need to create multiple tickets for partial amounts (e.g. create four $25 open tickets for the $100 item until it's paid off), or set your items with variable prices (leave the price point blank) and after each payment you take for that sale you would void the original priced item after adding the new balance for the item.
You're correct that this would show item sales for each payment, so it's best to add notes to payments and open tickets to help keep track of details.
It's a pretty manual workaround, and partial payments is something we've been tracking for quite some time. If we have any updates on this we'll post the product update for everyone.
I'm curious if there's an update on this. I know that this thread is almost a year old now, but hopefully there's some sort of breakthrough. I'm using a similar workaround, but it does throw off our numbers.
I created a Layaway Deposit item that's tax free with a variable price.
Customer places an item on Layaway, I create a ticket for them with the item. I create a new sale with the layaway deposit and enter the amount that they are putting down or adding a payment. I place a note to that amount paid with the date to the ticket that I previously added.
When they pay it off, I add their item to a new sale and split payment using cash for the previous balance and they are left to pay off the amount.
This enables them to pay taxes for the full item cost instead of a discounted amount.
Thank you for taking the time to reach out, and for sharing your workaround—wish we could offer a way to make this process more streamlined. I went to check for updates, but there isn't anything that I can access in terms of a timeline yet.
If you haven't had the chance already, I'd also suggest having a look through some of our partner apps who may be able to offer a solution: App Marketplace > Items & Inventory. Hope this helps for now.
We do custom cakes, so when someone books with us, they normally put partial payment down as a deposit, and then they pay on the balance until it is paid off. Since Square doesn't offer any way to do this, we bought a special set of plastic gift cards, and as a customer pays on their cake, we add that amount they paid to a specific gift card that we have assigned to their purchase. We keep the gift card attached to their contract, and then when they have paid in full, we ring the cake up in square using the gift card as payment.
After the gift card is completely used up, we make sure that it is completely zeroed out, and then we recycle it to use again. We made the gift cards a simple white card with black writing that say the name of our business, and Cake deposit account. Each card has a unique number on the back of it, so we also write the last four numbers on the contract. It's a little clunky, but until Square adds this feature, this has been the best way that we've been able to figure out to do this.
Hey @RosebearyBakery - Thank you so much for taking the time to share your workaround here!
I wanted to share some other options with you. We recently released Square Installments which allows your customers to pay monthly. The cool thing about this is that you still get paid the full amount up front.
If that isn't the solution for you, we are also developing our Invoice Partial Payments feature where your customers can pay a portion of the Invoice you sent them now and pay the rest later. It's currently in beta so if you'd like to be part of the early access program, check out this thread.
It would be really nice to have this feature. Especially around the holidays. I think I'll just keep doing it on paper until there is a better option. All the workarounds are too confusing. I like the idea of making a layaway payment as an item so I may try to incorporate that into my system. Please keep us posted.
