Sqaure

Square is a commerce platform built around in-person payments. It pairs affordable card readers and terminals with free point-of-sale software, letting shops, cafes, salons and market sellers take card and contactless payments, manage a product catalogue, issue receipts and see their sales in real time. From that foundation Square has grown into a full ecosystem - inventory, online stores, appointment booking, team management, invoicing and business banking - all sharing one account and one view of the customer. Its arrival helped democratise card acceptance for small merchants, replacing terminal rental contracts with buy-the-hardware, pay-per-transaction simplicity.

Square suits SMBs whose revenue happens mostly face to face: retail, hospitality, beauty and services with a counter or a chair. It scales from a single reader plugged into a phone to multi-location businesses running dedicated Square Terminal and Register hardware, and its free software tier means a merchant can start with almost no fixed cost and add paid capabilities as the business grows.

Key features

• Point of sale: free POS software with a product catalogue, discounts, receipts and refunds.
• Hardware range: from a compact reader to fully integrated terminals and registers.
• Inventory management: stock counts, low-stock alerts and item-level sales reporting.
• Online selling: a hosted online store and payment links that share the same catalogue.
• Analytics: real-time dashboards showing sales, busiest hours and top items.
• Add-on products: appointments, staff management, loyalty and marketing within the same ecosystem.
• Fast payouts: card takings settle to the bank on a regular schedule, with faster options available.
• Invoicing and virtual terminal: bill remote customers or key in card payments from the same account when a sale happens away from the counter.

How it fits an SMB finance stack

For an in-person business, Square often is the front half of the finance stack: every sale, refund and tip flows through it, making its reports the operational record of revenue. Takings settle to the bank as bundled payouts net of fees, which the accounting software then unpicks - Square connects to the major cloud ledgers or exports its data so revenue, fees and VAT are booked correctly. The deeper a merchant goes into the ecosystem (inventory, staff, online sales), the more Square becomes the single place where the trading side of the business is visible day to day.

Daily takings are also the raw material of cash planning for a merchant: rent and payroll are fixed, but revenue moves with footfall and seasons. A cash flow management tool like Trezy pairs with a Square-based stack through bank synchronisation, capturing payouts as they land and rolling them into forecasts alongside outgoing costs. That lets a shop or restaurant see whether a slow month is a blip it can absorb or a squeeze it needs to plan for.