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How do I change owners under "Employees"?

Okay, so I have a Square Register account that is run by myself and three others (who have equal ownership in the company). I was toying around under employees and added one but now I cannot remove it. The current "owner" is one of the three other people that helps run the company and to make matters worse there is now a passcode required everytime we log on. I wish to bring my account back to how it was before- log on using our company email and nothing more, because now the account is still the company, but logging out now has the co-owners name on it.

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Hello! The "Owner" employee is part of each account. The name assigned to this employee will reflect the first and last name of the individual's SSN who was used to activate the Square account.

 

While we don't have a way to delete an owner account, you can reduce the need to enter your pass code by making a few adjustments to your settings. From the Square Point of Sale app > tap Settings > Team Management > then tap Never under the Require Employee Passcode section. 

 


Sean
he/him/his
Product Manager | Square, Inc.

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Square

Best Answer

Hello! The "Owner" employee is part of each account. The name assigned to this employee will reflect the first and last name of the individual's SSN who was used to activate the Square account.

 

While we don't have a way to delete an owner account, you can reduce the need to enter your pass code by making a few adjustments to your settings. From the Square Point of Sale app > tap Settings > Team Management > then tap Never under the Require Employee Passcode section. 

 


Sean
he/him/his
Product Manager | Square, Inc.
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Hi.  Thank you, the information you gave was very helpful.  So does that mean, if you wanted to change a DBA owner, for instance, it would be better to close my account and open a new one?

               Sincerely, Karla K.

                Manila Vanilla

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Square

Good question, @manilavanilla11. That is exactly what we would advise; the person who created the account will always be associated with it, so it's best to create a new one if they are no longer associated with the business. 

 

When creating a new account the same EIN and bank account can be used as well. Hope that helps, let us know if you have any other questions.

 

 

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This is absolutely awful. I created an account for a business that I do not own. I would NEVER give my ssn for a business I am not legally tied to. Square support is telling me that I had to have given it to them, because my SSN is on the account. I am not stupid- I would not give it to you. Please tell me how else Square would have had access to it?

 

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Admin

Hi @angrycustomer1,

 

Thanks for reaching out and sorry for the confusion. In order to activate your account for card processing, you would have to enter in the last four numbers of your social security number as part of the registration flow. We are required by federal law to verify and record information that identifies each person who opens a Square account.

 

For privacy purposes, rest assured that we are not able to view this highly sensitive information — though we may be required to verify it if you ask us to take certain actions on your account. In addition, our seller's security is our number one priority — we will never share your personal information.

 

For more details on information required for activating your account, please have a look at this section of our Support Center: Information Required to Sign Up. For more on how we protect both sellers and customers, have a look at this article: Privacy and Security.

 

We take your concerns seriously. Hopefully this helps clear things up. Please let us know if you have any other questions.

️ Tom | he/him
Seller Community Manager | Square, Inc.
Find step-by-step help in our Support Center
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This is not an acceptable solution. My concern isn't about access to information... it's not reasonable to accept that a (could-be) former employee would have any association with the retail business that they work(ed) for - which is the case for us. There must be a way for a programmer to access the field in the backend code to replace the information.  If not, then the infastructure of this software is not as robust as it should be which could lead to other problems down the line.

 

If we need to start a new account will Square offer up a service rep to replicate all of our entries and work?

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Alumni

Hi @debragerber,

 

Sorry to hear this - we definitely understand that if your employee opened the account in their name instead of yours would be frustrating. The owner of a Square account is the individual that opened the account and there is not a way to change the owner of the account.

 

Unfortunately, we won't be able to replicate your account for you. You can, however, export the item library from the existing account and import items online to your new account. For details like past reports, you can always login to the old account. 

 

Sorry again for the frustration on this, please let us know if you have any other questions. 

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I too had an employee setup the account that has left. They no longer have access (although it appears if they used the last 4 of their SSN they could reset it). This seems very small-town. You need to learn to scale your business as we scale our businesses. Deleting all our prior history by restarting an account pretty much means when I scale I'm going to go to a better solution. You're working yourself out of being the solution for growing businesses. Not sure why you want to support only small static businesses.

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Admin

Very sorry for the frustration, @fvha. For for information and step-by-steps on how to proceed, please have a look at our Support Center: Can I Transfer Ownership of a Square Account?

 

If you need any account-specific issues resolved, you may need to work with the previous employee and get in touch with our CS Team directly—they'll be able to make sure this gets sorted out. In addition, I'll be sharing your post with our Point of Sale team and point out how these constraints are impacting your business. 

 

We'll be sure to update this thread as well as that article as soon as any other updates for making this process more scalable become available. Again, I apologize for the trouble—please let me know if you have any further questions.

️ Tom | he/him
Seller Community Manager | Square, Inc.
Find step-by-step help in our Support Center
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I have the same problem. An employee, no longer with teh business did the initial setup and is now the "owner" for good.

 

Tom - you say: The owner of a Square account is the individual that opened the account and there is not a way to change the owner of the account.

 

But why isn't there a way? I'm sure the database entry with those details can be updated (tech wise). This doesn't seem to make sense. is there a way to pass this to the product team to fix it?

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Hello @eggs

 

Currently we don't have the ability to update an owners name on an account or transfer ownership. I'll make sure to share your request with the Product Team, but this is something that we're still collecting feedback for at this time. 

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I am the owner of my Square Business Account and the only employee of my company. I got married since opening my account, and need to change my last name. How do I do that, so when my new clients schedule their appointments they aren't confused?

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Hello @imlashinout!

 

Currently we do not have the ability to update the owners name on a Square Account. Although, if you want just update your name for Appointments I recommend taking a look at the Display Name option. If you head to the Appointments Tab on your Square Dashboard you will find it under the Staff List.  If you click on your name a new menu will open up on the right side of your screen. Scroll down to Display Name. If you create a name here it will be displayed on all new appointment notifications. Old appointments will still display your old name. 

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It has been over a year and this problem has not been addressed. I also have the issue where I can not change the owner even though they left. We are a department within a business and therefore it's not a simple ordeal to change over to a brand new account. This is unacceptable for a software company in 2019 to be unable to address such a simple problem. 

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Admin

@Misu I'm very sorry for the frustration this has caused. Square accounts can't be transferred because they are set up using the account owner's SSN (an EIN can be added as well) - and we can't update the SSN tied to a Square account at this time.

 

I will share your feedback with the product teams so we can improve this to help business when they change ownership. In the meantime, if you have questions about the best way to manage your account now the owner has left call our CS team so they can help. 

️ Helen
Seller Community Manager

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We have the same issue for our business. The initial owner has left the business and we would like to update the owner. Has there been any change or update to Square that would allow for this. I would much prefer to just have the owner changed than to have to go through the process of saving our data, deactivating and starting a new account. An update would be greatly appreciated!

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Square Community Moderator

Hi @RRE! Welcome to the Community.

 

No update on this yet but we'll be sure to update these threads if that ever does happen. 

Ashley C
Community Moderator, Square
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I think the problem with not being able to change owners is deeper than just the inconvenience. Our original "owner" was a Board member of a non profit organization and after a particularly large event took place, he was told by the IRS that he had to pay taxes on $75,000 of income, as they assumed he was the owner of the business, and treated it as personal income for him.  It took him almost a year to get that straightened out.  And we are still 'stuck' with him being listed as an owner, which means he may be getting billed by the IRS for the following years, as well.  We run the same events annually, with roughly that much income.  Your answers indicate that the IRS wants to identify the owner on accounts where income is produced.  I would think the IRS would much prefer to have the owner listed be accurate.  And apparently, the last 4 digits of the SSN are sufficient for the IRS to figure out who the original owner was...  Add me to the list of people who consider this unacceptable.  

 

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so if we have to create a new account in order to change owners when they leave the organization, what happens to our history under the old owner?

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Square Community Moderator

Hi @SAR2 👋 Previous account sales and reporting history will remain accessible under the previous account. Square Accounts, while having the ability to be deleted, are never fully deactivated - meaning that this history will remain available to those who have access.

 

I hope this helps! Let me know if you have any further questions.

Joe
Community Moderator, Square
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