Square Dives Into Data

Square on Thursday (Aug. 21) rolled out an analytics tool—called Square Analytics—that the firm is positioning as another step to level the playing field for small and medium sized businesses.

The analytics function integrates invoicing, pick-up, appointments and other sales related information to give merchants using Square Register a more a complete view of their customer’s spending habits. The service allows for further granularity, by easily allowing users to break-down the data into sub-categories that keeps track of what the items/services are most popular and what the day’s highest traffic periods are.

Square Analytics further offers an analytics homepage, to get an almost realtime snapshot of businesses performance, a sales trends feature as well as a buyer insights element that keeps track of customer data about frequency of visits and average spend.

“When I opened Just Baked in Detroit, I was guessing when customers would stop in for a cupcake. Square Analytics showed that this location’s busiest hour was actually between 4:00 PM and 5:00 PM. We would have closed at 4:00 PM and missed out on sales if not for Square Analytics’ hour-by-hour trends,” small business owner Pam Turkin said of the service.

Since the beginning of 2014, the story of Square has essentially become the a series of questions about what is Square going to do next. There have been the rumors—and the responses to rumors.