If you’re like Mike and me, the only thing you use your wallet for is to hold all your plastic cards and your driver’s license. Your pockets, otherwise, are full of your car keys, lint and maybe an odd wadded-up credit card receipt or two from lunch and the gas station…
Cash? What’s cash? Well, visitors to Hess Brewing well know that cash has been the only accepted exchange…but that’s all changed now!
We’ve been waiting patiently since June to get hooked into “the next thing” for small businesses, courtesy of Twitter’s founder, an app called Square. After signing up this summer and validating our bank account (by making a couple of small, 13 and 21 cent deposits) Square put Hess Brewing in the queue. 
Works on iPad, iPhone and Android.
Fast forward 4 months…and guess what shows up!? Our very own "Square Reader". This little gizmo-jobber (technical name) or whatever you want to call it is a plastic, dice-shaped cube that plugs into our Smart Phone (Michael: iPhone, me: Android) or the tasting room’s iPad headphone jack.
Seriously, that's it. The Magic of Square.
Through the magic of the interweb thingy, information is transmitted from a credit card swipe into a signal that Square then approves, charging the user’s card. A day or two later, Square ‘squares’ up with us, transferring money into our bank account.
We should mention the killer interface that the folks at Square put into the iPad app. We have set up our iPad as a POS – a point of sale – device, which allows us to touch the picture/icon of the good purchased – taster flight, pub glass, growler, fill, etc and it tallies up the total, etc.
We have all our items for sale built into the Square POS.
Want a receipt? No problem – after you sign, using your finger on the screen of the device, enter your email address and we’ll send one to you. How slick is that?
No pen, no problem.
So, next time you’re running out to Hess Brewing to enjoy a cold one, don’t worry about running to the bank first. Come on in, and swipe away!
Cheers!
Great write up! We've been using square at the Little Italy Farmers' Market booth too. Almost justified an iPad purchase! Works great I might add.
ReplyDeleteI had to wait about 5 months for my Square. I signed up in early Spring. Because they were giving away the devices for FREE...they got slammed with request. Now...I have 3 of these things...but that's another story how I got 3. It works great. Now I hope that the only companies like Authorize.net follow suite and lower their monthly charges. I'm paying around $50 a month for my online billing even if I don't have sales. But about 90% of my clients pay online, so I have to have it. Anyone local though...I can use my iPhone and Square. It is awesome. I just wish it came in Black. Looks a little ugly next to the beautiful iPhone 4.
ReplyDeleteBlack would be awesome.
ReplyDeleteYeah. It made sense for us since there is no monthly charges, pretty decent rates too.
iPad app is considerably better than the iPhone app too. It has a good POS system built in. I just wish you could create multiple pages of costumers and save them to pay later.