Excludes failed/cancelled. Pairs with revenue to spot AOV-vs-volume issues.
At a glance
Total count of orders placed in the period across every Square channel. The Friday-9am volume read, paired with Total Revenue it tells you whether last week was driven by more customers or bigger baskets.
Calculation
Calculated automatically from your Square Online data. See the At a glance summary above for what the metric tracks and the worked example below for a typical reading.Worked example
A boutique gift store in Austin running on Square, one retail location plus a Square Online site for nationwide shipping. The 30-day window covers 14 Mar 26 to 12 Apr 26.
Three things to notice:
- POS dominates volume; web dominates revenue weight. 78% of orders are in-store (averaging ~85 AOV) carry far more revenue per order. This card can stay flat while Total Revenue swings hard if the channel mix shifts.
- The 180 excluded
CANCELEDorders are mostly register voids. Square POS lets staff void a transaction up until tender is finalised. These don’t count here, which is the right behaviour: a voided register order isn’t a real order. If a merchant sees a sudden spike in cancellations, that’s a separate signal worth investigating in Square Dashboard. - The 30-day prior window was 3,910 orders. Total Orders is down 11.4% vsP. Below the
drop >20% WoWalert threshold, so Vortex IQ Nerve Centre stays quiet, but pairing this card with AOV shows whether the revenue impact was softened by basket-size lift or amplified by basket-size drop.
Sibling cards merchants should reference together
Reconciling against the vendor’s own dashboard
Where to look in the Square Dashboard: Square Dashboard, Reports, Sales summary and Orders. Set the same date range, leave Location on All locations, and look at the Orders count column. The number should match this card to within a handful of orders (timezone boundary effects). Other Square Dashboard views that look like the same number but aren’t:- Orders, list view, filtered by date: this DOES match if you set the same dates, all locations, and exclude DRAFT and CANCELED.
- Reports, Payments: counts payment events, not orders. One order with a split tender (half cash, half card) shows two payments but one order. Always lower than this card.
- Reports, Item sales, line count: counts line items, not orders. Always higher than this card.
- Dashboard home, Today’s orders: today only, in the location’s local time zone.
Cross-connector reconciliation:
The Square POS + Square Online unification: because Square’s Orders API is unified across POS, web, and Invoices, this card answers “how many transactions did the business do?” rather than “how many web orders?”. On Shopify or BigCommerce the same count would require stitching POS + web channels manually; on Square it’s native.
Known limitations / merchant FAQs
Does this count include my POS register sales? Yes. Every Square channel writes to the same Orders API, so this card aggregates POS, Square Online web, and Square Invoices into one count. To split, filter bysource.name (= SQUARE_POS, SQUARE_ONLINE_STORE, INVOICE, or third-party integration source) or by location_id.
Are cancelled orders included?
No. CANCELED and DRAFT orders are excluded. Only OPEN and COMPLETED orders count. This matches what most Square merchants intuitively mean by “orders”. A register void or an abandoned web cart isn’t a real order.
Are refunded orders excluded?
No. A fully refunded order still counts as 1 here. The refund lives on a separate Refund object in Square’s Refunds API and is reflected on the Refund Rate card. Think of this card as “transactions started” not “transactions kept”.
Why doesn’t this match my Stripe charge count?
Square processes its own payments; Stripe usually sees zero or near-zero for Square merchants. Stripe will only show charge counts if you’re running a separate, non-Square billing tool alongside (e.g. a SaaS subscription product, a marketplace integration). Square Dashboard is the source of truth for transaction count on Square accounts.
Why doesn’t Google Analytics 4 match?
GA4 only fires purchase events on web orders, never on POS. So GA4’s transaction count is at most the web subset of this card, and even that is missing 10, 25% of orders due to ad blockers, consent rejections, and tag-fire failures. Use Square Dashboard for transaction count, GA4 for traffic and channel attribution.
My multi-location Square account, how do I see per-cafe order counts?
Filter by location_id. The Square Online dashboard tab also exposes per-location panels you can pin in the Vortex IQ Nerve Centre to compare locations side-by-side.
Why does today’s order count look low?
Today is incomplete. New orders are added throughout the day; today’s number won’t stabilise until end-of-day in the location’s time zone. Use the rolling 7-day or 30-day view for stable comparisons, that’s why the alert window is 30D vsP and not 1D.
What’s the action playbook when this card drops sharply?
Three checks in order: (1) per-channel split, did web orders drop or POS orders drop? POS drops point to footfall (weather, local events, staffing), web drops point to traffic or conversion, (2) Conversion Rate, if web is the culprit and CR fell, the issue is on-site (checkout, pricing, stock); if CR is steady, traffic is the culprit (campaign pause, ad spend cut, SEO drop), (3) New Customers vs returning, if new customer count fell harder, it’s an acquisition issue.