At a glance
The count of successful Square payments in the period across all channels (POS, Square Online, Invoices, Virtual Terminal, Tap to Pay). The denominator behind average transaction size; the numerator behind volume-per-day trending. Each/v2/paymentsrow withstatus = COMPLETEDis one transaction, regardless of value.
Calculation
Calculated automatically from your Square data. See the At a glance summary above for what the metric tracks and the worked example below for a typical reading.Worked example
The same Austin bookshop (“Ravenwing Books”) on 30-day window 03 Apr 26 to 02 May 26.- POS dominates count, not value. 4,935 of 5,649 transactions (87.4%) are POS; only 714 are online. But online’s average ticket (USD 34.80) is materially higher than POS retail (USD 22.92), so the value split is more balanced than the count split.
- Cash transactions skew the average down. Cash-drawer transactions (USD 12.03 avg) are mostly small-value impulse buys (a single magazine, a coffee). They pull the blended average ticket down. Some merchants exclude cash from the avg-ticket card; this card always counts them.
- Square Invoices have a wildly higher average. 14 invoices at USD 342.86 average is the trade / event channel (book signings, schools, libraries). It’s a small count but materially affects the per-channel revenue mix.
- Tap to Pay on iPhone count = 95. A small but meaningful number for a Saturday-morning pop-up; this is volume that simply did not exist before 2023 for sole proprietors. No hardware was bought; the owner used their own iPhone.
- Day-of-week seasonality. Splitting these 5,649 transactions by day, Saturday peaks at ~310 transactions, Sunday at ~210, weekdays at ~150, 180. Retail-led Square merchants always see this shape; ecom-led merchants typically see a Tue/Wed/Thu peak.
Sibling cards merchants should reference together
Reconciling against the vendor’s own dashboard
Where to look in the Square Dashboard: Sign in at squareup.com/dashboard. The closest comparable view is:Reports → Sales → Sales Summary (filter by date range; “Transactions” tile)Other views:
- Reports → Transactions (per-transaction list). This is the underlying ledger this card counts.
- Reports → Sales by source (POS / Online / API / Invoices breakdown). Useful for splitting the count.
- Items → Item sales (per-SKU). Higher than transaction count because one transaction often has multiple line items.
Cross-connector reconciliation:
This card is currency-neutral, so multi-currency merchants get a single clean count.
Known limitations / merchant FAQs
“Does this count POS and online together?” Yes, it’s the unified/v2/payments count. POS card-present, Square Online checkouts, Cash App Pay, Apple Pay, cash drawer, Tap to Pay, and Invoices all flow through the same ledger. This is Square’s core product positioning and the single most useful operational property of the API.
“My split-tender transactions, how do those count?”
Square Orders can be paid by multiple payments (e.g. a USD 100 order paid USD 60 by card + USD 40 by cash). That’s two /v2/payments rows = two transactions in this card. The order count is one. If you want order count specifically, the /v2/orders endpoint is the right source; this card uses payments deliberately for revenue parity.
“Do failed taps that the customer re-tapped count once or multiple times?”
Once. A failed authorisation creates a FAILED row; that’s excluded. The successful re-tap creates a separate COMPLETED row; that’s the one counted. So a tap-fail-then-tap-succeed pattern produces one count, not two.
“What about Square’s offline mode (no internet at the till)?”
Square POS stores offline transactions locally and uploads when connectivity returns. They appear in /v2/payments with the original transaction time once uploaded. If a sync window misses the upload, the count for that period stays low until the catch-up sync.
“Subscription rebills and recurring invoices, how do those count?”
Each rebill or auto-charged invoice is one transaction here. Square Subscriptions creates a /v2/payments row on each successful rebill.
“Why is the transaction count higher than my order count in Square?”
Split-tender (one order, multiple payments) is the most common cause. Tipping (a tip applied after the original sale via /v2/payments/{id}/complete) is sometimes a separate event. Re-runs after a chip-read failure that succeeded second time aren’t double-counted (the failed attempt was excluded).
“My pop-up market sales on Tap to Pay on iPhone, do those count?”
Yes, indistinguishably from chip-and-tap on a Square Reader. source_type = CARD, entry_method = CONTACTLESS. The only difference is device_details is absent (no hardware terminal ID).
“Multi-currency, does this work?”
Yes; this card is a pure count, currency-neutral. A merchant with one US location (USD) and one Canadian location (CAD) gets a single combined transaction count.