Bring your Square sales and your other orders into one list your team can work from

Orders come in from everywhere, and some get missed

Your counter runs on Square, and it’s fine. The trouble is everything else. A catering order arrives by email, another comes through the website form, and someone rings one through during the lunch rush. Each one gets copied onto a whiteboard or a notepad, and the kitchen works from that. Most days it works. On the day it doesn’t, a tray of sandwiches isn’t ready when the customer arrives.

Why Square on its own doesn’t do the job

Square is good at what goes through it: counter sales, payments, and online orders placed through Square. It keeps a tidy record of every one.

But orders that arrive by email or your own form never reach Square. They live in an inbox, a notebook, or someone’s memory. Square can’t read an email and turn it into an order, and it can’t join your catering orders with your counter sales into a prep list for tomorrow.

How we connect it with Square

We work with a six-person cafe with a catering arm. Catering orders came by email, phone, and form, and were copied onto a whiteboard. We connected the pieces so every order lands in one Google Sheet. An AI helper (the industry calls it an agent) reads the order emails from Gmail and adds them, form orders flow in on their own, and the sheet produces a daily prep list. Square sales sit alongside.

In the first two months, the cafe didn’t miss an order. Phone orders are still typed in by staff, because someone has to take the call. Read the cafe catering story.

Before we built it, we mapped how they work (the industry calls it process mapping). That told us how the kitchen likes the prep list laid out, and which orders always need a person to look at them first.

When connecting Square is the right call, and when it isn’t

It pays off when orders reach you through more than one door, and someone copies them by hand into one place. Cafes with catering, shops that take wholesale orders, and venues with event bookings often fit.

If every order already goes through Square, you may not need this, and we’ll tell you. If you mainly want to see which items sell and which sit, look at reports that write themselves for Square instead.

Where to go next

See the wider connecting your tools service, or read about Square. Compare connecting your tools with Stripe. See how we work with hospitality and events and fashion businesses. When you’re ready, get your AI Starter Plan.