Connect Your Square Account

Click Sales Channels in the sidebar (or go to Settings → Integrations; open Integrations) and click "Connect Square". Square opens its own sign-in and approval page. Sign in with the Square account you sell through, review what Ardent Seller asks for, and approve. Square sends you back to Ardent Seller with the new connection open.

Ardent Seller asks Square to read your business profile, orders, payments, items, inventory and customers, and to write inventory counts. That is the only thing it can change in Square (the permissions are MERCHANT_PROFILE_READ, ORDERS_READ, PAYMENTS_READ, ITEMS_READ, INVENTORY_READ, INVENTORY_WRITE and CUSTOMERS_READ). Ardent Seller never creates or edits items, prices or descriptions in your Square catalog, and never takes, moves or refunds money; Square stays your register.

Your new connection opens with a Run First Sync button. It asks for:

• Default Location — where sales and stock land when no location mapping says otherwise.
• Stock updates to Square — Manual only never changes your Square counts unless you push by hand, and Auto push sends each mapped location its count whenever stock changes in Ardent Seller. Nothing is preselected, and you can change it later in the connection's Settings.
• Import Window — how far back to import completed sales during this first sync.
• Auto-Create Products — optionally create products in Ardent Seller from the Square items pulled in, instead of linking each one yourself.

The sheet also reminds you that sales rung up in Square as a custom amount import with their total but change no stock (see walk-in sales and custom amounts below). Ardent Seller also creates a customer named Square walk-in for this connection. Within a few minutes your Square locations, items and sales start to arrive.

Square keeps item counts per location, and so does Ardent Seller. On the connection's Locations tab, match each Square location to one of your Ardent Seller locations (see Locations & Entities). Each row has two switches:

• Sync stock — whether that Square location is kept in step with the mapped Ardent Seller location. Ardent Seller never writes counts to a location left unmapped or switched off.
• Fallback for unmapped — exactly one mapping is the fallback. A sale rung up at a Square location you have not mapped is recorded at the fallback mapping's Ardent Seller location, or at the connection's default location if there is no fallback.

Click "Save mappings". If you add or rename a location in Square later, "Refresh from store" pulls the list again. If you sell from one place, this is usually a single row mapped to your main location.

Each Square item variation maps to one inventory item, and that link is what turns a sale line into a stock movement on the right product. Items are pulled in during the first sync and every 6 hours after that. Ardent Seller links them by SKU first: a variation whose SKU exactly matches one of your items is linked automatically, even if that item is already linked to an Etsy or Shopify listing. Variations without a SKU get a match key built from the Square item's ID, starting with SQUARE-.

Link the rest yourself on the connection's Listings tab: filter to unlinked listings, then link each one to an existing item or create a new product from the listing. An item with several variations shows one row per variation. Creating products from listings first asks whether they are food; choose Food or Other, and every product created in that batch gets that product type.

Opening stock: when a variation is linked and Square holds a count for it, Ardent Seller records an initial transaction that seeds the item's on-hand quantity to match, dated at the start of your import window so the imported sales history subtracts correctly. See How Stock Moves.

Sales with no customer. Most register sales carry no customer at all. Instead of creating a new customer for each one, Ardent Seller records them against the connection's walk-in customer, named Square walk-in. To use a different customer, open the connection's Settings and pick one under Walk-in customer, or choose None to leave those sales without a customer. A sale that does carry a Square customer is matched to, or creates, that customer as your connection's customer settings allow.

Custom amounts and unlinked items. A line rung up in Square as a custom amount has no item behind it, and an item you have not linked yet has no inventory item behind it. Both still import with their full revenue, so your sales totals are right, but no stock is deducted for them. The connection's Sales tab has a Needs attention filter that lists the sales carrying such lines, so you can link the item or adjust stock by hand, but not both. Linking the item to an existing product on the Listings tab, with syncing on, makes its earlier sales deduct stock straight away (if there are a great many, the rest link overnight); with syncing off, nothing is relinked until you turn it back on. So if you already adjusted stock by hand for those sales, reverse that adjustment before you link the item, or the sales are deducted twice. Creating a new product from the item with Create product relinks nothing: the new product starts from the stock Square reports, which already reflects those sales. Tips and service charges also import as lines of their own; they are money, not items, so they are never flagged.

• Disconnect Shop stops all syncing and revokes Ardent Seller's access in Square. Your imported transactions, item links, location mappings and sync history are preserved. If the same Square account is also connected to another Ardent Seller account, that other connection keeps working; only this one loses access.
• Reconnect runs Square's approval again for the same Square account (a different account is refused). Your item links, location mappings and settings are restored where the items still exist.
• Delete Connection is available only after disconnecting and is permanent: it removes the item links, location mappings, sync history and imported sale records for the connection. Transactions already in your books are kept.

The connection uses Square's OAuth authorization: you sign in and approve on Square's own pages, never in Ardent Seller, so your Square password is never seen or stored by Ardent Seller. The access tokens Square issues are renewed automatically; they are encrypted at rest with AES-256-GCM, never shown in the app and never written to logs. You can end access at any time with Disconnect Shop.

Ardent Seller reads customer details only to match or create the customer on an imported sale, and only as the connection's customer settings allow. Card details and receipt links are stripped from the copy of each Square sale that Ardent Seller keeps.