Whether your business sells products or services, using Square‘s inventory item feature will save you a lot of time at checkout. Before adding Square inventory items, you need to be familiar with how to process a sale on Square and create and send an invoice on Square. If not, read the linked the articles and come back to this article once you’re done

If you sell a lot of the same product, creating an inventory item lets you quickly add that item to a transaction or invoice without having to input the price each time. Or, if you are a service business that has set fees for certain offerings, you can add those as inventory items as well. In this article, we’ll give you step by step instructions on how to add inventory items in Square. If you don’t have an account yet, click here to sign up (it’s free to get started!):

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Step 1: Sign In At Squareup.com

The first thing you need to do is go to Squareup.com and log in to your account. Simply click the “sign in” text at the top right of the page, enter your username and password on the next page, and click “sign in” again.

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Step 2: Click On The “Items” Tab On Your Main Dashboard

Once your main dashboard page loads, you will see a vertical list of text tabs on the left side of your screen. Click on the “Items” tab.

Step 3: Hit The “Create an Item” Button At The Bottom Of The Page

Once the page loads, hit the “Create an Item” button at the bottom of the page. If you want to create multiple inventory items, you can import the items using an Excel or .CSV spreadsheet. We’ll cover that at the end of this article.

Step 4: Edit Image, Name, & Category

To edit your inventory item image or color, you can hit the square “edit” box and “add image”. You can also select a color for your product to help visually categorize it in your dashboard (i.e., all cleaning services are purple). Once you’re finished, click done.

Once you are done with that, enter your item name into the “name” field and then pick its category. For example, if you have a bakery, you might have different categories for “cakes”, “cupcakes”, and “cookies”.

If you already have a category created, simply click on the “category” field and select it from the drop down list. If not, then you can simply click on the field, write in a category, and click enter.

Step 5: Set Price Options

This is fairly straightforward, but you obviously need to add your price to your inventory item. The one option always included is the “Regular” price. But, you can also specify other special situation pricing, such as the “wholesale” price or “sale” price.

Here’s an example of one of my “Water” plate inventory items.

Step 6: Set Square Inventory Tracking

If you want to actually track ongoing inventory numbers for specific products, then you can turn on inventory tracking by clicking on “Start Tracking Item Inventory” at the bottom. That allows you to set the initial number of inventory items to start, which will then decrease as sales are made (of course, you can always add inventory when you receive them from your suppliers). You can choose to receive alerts once inventory hits a specific level.

Square also has an ecommerce option for online stores. If you have that, then you can also configure how your inventory items show up on your site (image, url, etc).

Step 7: Review & Save Your Square Inventory Items

Once you have filled everything out, do a final review to make sure that everything is set as you’d like it to be. If your inventory item is good to go, then just hit the “Save” button at the top right corner of your screen and your item is complete.

Once you have your inventory items created, then you can easily select them on your point of sale from the item library to add them to a sale or add them quickly to your invoices. To access your newly created items, you can go to your mobile device, click “items” on the left hand menu, and then click “all items”. You can add Square inventory items from the app too, but it’s easier on a desktop or laptop. Here’s how to access inventory items in the app.

Step 8. (Optional) Import Inventory Items From A .CSV file

If you have multiple inventory items that you want to add or update, it’s quickest to import the items using an Excel or .CSV file. To do so, go back to the items tab in the lefthand menu and click “import”.

After clicking “import”, you are given two options:

• Modify Item Library – choose this option if you want to add new items to your inventory or update details for existing items (e.g. an item’s price or image). This will not delete any items from your item library.
• Replace Item Library – choose this option if you want to replace all your existing items with new items. The old entries will be deleted.

To import items, you’ll need to download Square’s template file and put in your specific details. Then, upload the file to update your item library.

Bottom Line

Square inventory items feature is a great way to speed things up when you have a long line of customers or a big stack of invoices to send. You’ll be glad you created your item library on your busiest days!

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