Square transactions to dashboard
Your Square sales, without the dollar signs in the way.
Export Transactions or Item Sales from the Square Dashboard and drop the CSV here. Square writes a dollar sign into every money cell, which turns those columns into text everywhere else. This page strips the symbol, keeps Gross Sales, Discounts, Net Sales, Tax, Tip and Fees separate, and builds the breakdown by item, category and location.
Prefer the full explorer? Open the app, or start from the generic dashboard builder.
Why a Square export refuses to add up
Open a Square transactions CSV in any spreadsheet and the money columns arrive left-aligned. That is the tell: they are text. Square writes the currency symbol inside the cell, so $4.50 is a string, and every SUM over it returns zero. The usual fix is a find-and-replace across six columns, which works right up until a negative discount comes through as $-0.45 and the cleanup leaves a stray minus in front of a symbol.
The second issue is that Square gives you six money columns which are related but not interchangeable. Gross Sales is before discounts. Net Sales is after. Total Collected includes tax and tip, so it is bigger than the sale. Fees is negative. Net Total is what actually reaches your bank. A café owner asking how much they made this month means a different one of those on Monday than on Tuesday, so this page shows them side by side rather than picking one.
How to export from Square
- Open the Square Dashboard Sign in at squareup.com/dashboard and go to Reports, then Transactions. If you want per-item detail instead of per-payment, use Reports, then Item Sales, which is a different shape.
- Set the date range and location The location picker at the top matters: leaving it on a single site quietly excludes the others. Choose All locations if you want Location to work as a group-by.
- Click Export and choose Transactions CSV Square offers Transactions CSV, Items Detail CSV and Summary. Transactions gives one row per payment with the fee attached, which is the version this page is tuned for.
- Check the download The file lands with the date range in its name. Open the first line and confirm the money columns carry a currency symbol; that is normal and handled here.
- Drop it on this page Category and Item become group-by chips straight away, so the first thing you see is what sells, not a table of payment ids.
Square reports in the time zone set on each location, not UTC, so a late-night trade on one site and an early-morning one on another can land on different calendar days for the same clock hour.
Try with sample Square data (the same columns, 116 rows, no upload needed).
What the dashboard shows
Every panel below is built from a column that is actually in the export, named the way Square names it.
- Net sales by day. Date and Time combine into the trend axis, and Net Sales rather than Total Collected is used so tax and tip do not distort the line.
- Category and Item breakdown. Two levels of the same question. Category answers what kind of thing sells; Item answers which one, ranked.
- Tip rate. Tip against Net Sales as a percentage, which for hospitality is usually the most watched number in the file.
- Effective processing cost. Fees against Total Collected, with the negative sign respected, so you can see what the card mix is costing.
- Source and Card Brand. Point of Sale against Square Online, and the card mix inside that, both as clickable filters.
- Location comparison. Where a business runs more than one site, Location is the cross-filter that makes every other panel comparable.
Date,Time,Time Zone,Category,Item,Qty,Gross Sales,Discounts,Net Sales,Tax,Tip,Total Collected,Source,Card Brand,Fees,Net Total,Location,Dining Option,Payment IDSquare export quirks worth knowing
- Money columns are text. The dollar sign lives in the cell. Six columns are affected, and a spreadsheet will sum every one of them to zero without warning you.
- Discounts and Fees are negative. Both carry a leading minus inside the currency string, which is why naive symbol stripping produces $-0.45 style wreckage.
- Total Collected is not revenue. It is sale plus tax plus tip. Report on it and you are claiming the government's money and your staff's money as your own.
- Time zone is per location. The Time Zone column exists because a multi-site business genuinely has more than one. Sorting by Time across locations without it is meaningless.
- Refunds appear as separate negative rows. Unlike Stripe, Square writes a refund as its own row. A straight total already nets them, so do not subtract them again.
- Item Sales and Transactions disagree on purpose. One row per line item against one row per payment. The totals differ whenever a single payment covers several items, and neither is wrong.
Strip the symbols, pick the right one of the six money columns for the question you are asking, and remember the per-location time zone. That is the whole art of reading a Square export, and this page does the first two for you.
Frequently asked questions
Why does Excel sum my Square sales to zero?
Because Square writes the currency symbol inside the cell, which makes the whole column text rather than numbers. Excel will not add text, and it does not tell you why. The usual workaround is find and replace across six columns, but that breaks on negative values written as a minus in front of the symbol. This page reads the symbol, the minus and the digits together and treats the result as money.
Which column is my actual revenue?
Net Sales for the trading question, and Net Total for the banking question. Net Sales is gross minus discounts and excludes tax and tip, so it is what you sold. Net Total is what reaches your account after processing fees, tax collected and tips paid through. Total Collected sits in between and includes money that is not yours, so it flatters the numbers.
How do I compare two Square locations?
Export with the location picker set to All locations, then use Location as the group-by chip. Every other panel cross-filters to the site you click. Be careful with the time axis while you do it, because the Time Zone column can differ between sites and the same clock hour is not the same moment.
Are tips included in my sales figures?
Not in Net Sales, which is the figure this page leads with. Tips have their own column and are shown separately as both a total and a rate against sales. They are inside Total Collected, which is one of the reasons that column overstates revenue. If tips are pooled and paid out to staff, they were never revenue in the first place.
Can I load the Item Sales report instead?
Yes, and for a menu or product question it is the better file. It has one row per line item rather than one per payment, so quantities and item names are cleaner, but it does not carry the processing fee. Load whichever answers your question. Nothing here is tied to one report shape, since the columns are read from the header on arrival.
Does any of this touch a server?
No. The CSV is parsed by JavaScript in the browser tab you have open, and the charts are drawn from the result in memory. A Square export can carry customer names and payment identifiers, so this is not a small detail. There is no upload endpoint to send it to even if the page wanted one.
Related tools
Try it with a Square export shaped like yours
116 transactions across a quarter, two locations, tips and discounts and negative fees, every money column carrying a dollar sign just like the real thing.
Open the sample Square dashboard