Take Payments, Track Inventory And Run Loyalty Rewards With Square

You run a shop, a cafe or a salon on Square. The register works, the money shows up in the bank, and then the questions start. Can the web store and the counter share one product list? Can the stock count update itself when something sells? Can a regular get their loyalty points without a punch card? Can a chargeback be answered without logging into yet another dashboard? Each of those is something Square can do through an API, a way for one piece of software to ask another to do work, so your website, your accounting tool or an AI assistant can do it for you.

What Square does

Square describes itself as providing APIs for payment processing, point of sale, and business management solutions that let developers build custom commerce applications. What that means for a business owner is that every part of the Square account you already use has a corresponding set of calls. On APIs.io we list them by area, including the Catalog API, the Customers API, the Bookings API, the Checkout API, the Disputes API, the Devices API for the terminals on the counter, the Transfer Orders API for moving stock between locations, and a Reporting API in beta for building your own reports.

What you can get done

We map Square’s operations to 19 business capabilities. These are the five a small business reaches for first.

Card Transaction Processing Management

Taking the payment and defending it afterwards. A chargeback is when a cardholder disputes a charge with their bank, and these 16 operations let you both charge cards and answer disputes with evidence.

• POST /v2/payments charges a card or gift card from your own app, or records a cash or external payment taken outside Square.
• GET /v2/payments lists payments in a date range, with filters such as card brand or the last four digits.
• GET /v2/disputes lists the chargebacks currently open against your account.
• POST /v2/disputes/{dispute_id}/evidence-files attaches a receipt image or other file to fight a chargeback.
• POST /v2/disputes/{dispute_id}/evidence-text adds a written explanation or a tracking number as evidence.
• POST /v2/disputes/{dispute_id}/accept concedes a dispute instead of fighting it.

Payments & Card Management

Where the money went. A payout is Square sending your settled funds to your bank account, and these 22 operations also cover the older transaction records and the actions you can push to a Square Terminal.

• GET /v2/payouts lists the payouts to your bank account, filtered by status or date.
• GET /v2/payouts/{payout_id}/payout-entries breaks one payout down into the charges, refunds and fees that make it up.
• GET /v2/locations/{location_id}/transactions lists sales and refund transactions for one location.
• POST /v2/terminals/actions sends an action, such as a device pairing check, to a Square Terminal.

Item Master Data Management

Your catalog is the single list of what you sell, with variations, prices and photos. These 14 operations keep it current in bulk, which is how a web store and a counter stay in step.

• POST /v2/catalog/batch-upsert creates or updates many catalog items at once, which is how you import a whole product list.
• POST /v2/catalog/batch-retrieve fetches many items by their IDs in one call, optionally with related objects such as taxes.
• POST /v2/catalog/batch-delete removes a batch of items and their variations.
• POST /v2/catalog/images uploads a product photo and attaches it to an item.
• GET /v2/catalog/info tells you the batch size limits before you start.

Inventory Management

Stock levels and the history of how they changed. These 13 operations record recounts, sales and waste, and read the adjustments back.

• POST /v2/inventory/changes/batch-create records a stock recount or adjustment for many items at once.
• GET /v2/inventory/adjustments/{adjustment_id} shows one adjustment, what it changed and when.

Loyalty & Retention Management

The punch card, without the card. These 18 operations enroll buyers, award and correct points, and keep the ledger of what was earned and redeemed.

• POST /v2/loyalty/accounts enrolls a customer in your loyalty program, typically by phone number.
• POST /v2/loyalty/accounts/search finds a loyalty member by phone number or customer ID.
• POST /v2/loyalty/accounts/{account_id}/accumulate awards the points earned on an order.
• POST /v2/loyalty/accounts/{account_id}/adjust manually corrects a point balance.
• POST /v2/loyalty/events/search searches the history of points earned and redeemed.

Square also covers your people. The Human Capital Management capability adds team members and job titles, and HR Operations Management handles break types, shifts and wages. Your customer list lives under Customer Data Management, with bulk create, update and delete for cleaning up duplicates.

Ask for it in plain language

We have written 42 conversational phrasing overlays for Square. An overlay is a layer we add on top of the API description that pairs each operation with the kinds of questions a person might ask, so an AI assistant knows which call answers which question. These are the kinds of things it maps:

• When did Square send money to my bank account?
• Which chargebacks are currently open against my account?
• How do I attach a receipt image to fight a chargeback?
• How do I import thousands of products into my Square catalog at once?
• How do I sign a customer up for my Square loyalty program using their phone number?
• How do I bulk add customers from a spreadsheet?

You can see one of them on the Bank Accounts API phrasing overlay.

Getting started

Square is a freemium, hosted service with self-serve signup: you call Square’s endpoint, and a developer account comes with the seller account you already have. Square’s documentation for the Reporting API is a good place to see how Square explains itself, and from there the same developer site covers every API named above. On APIs.io you can browse the Square profile, the Catalog API, the Customers API and the Disputes API. Start with the payout entries call above; seeing your own bank deposits broken into charges and fees is the quickest way to understand what the rest of this can do.