Square for Franchises: reseller training

Mike Collins (Square): All right, Travis, why don't you hop in here and give everyone a little introduction to yourself, your background and what you do here at Square.

Travis Kahn (Square): Great. Thanks, Mike, for the introduction. It's a pleasure to meet you all. My name is Travis Kahn. I'm a product specialist and sales engineer, focusing on our restaurant and food and beverage clients, with a special focus on franchises in particular.

I've been at Square for just about 11 years now. I started on our support team back in 2014, then worked on our implementation team for several years before leading implementation for our enterprise sales team, and then about three years ago moved into my current position.

So I'm glad we have the opportunity to go through some of the Square for Franchises features and functionality, and then, foundationally, why we're having this training at all.

As many of you know, these customers sign up for a Square account, and the Square account is typically tied to a particular business entity. You may notice that when a seller first creates their Square account, they're asked to go through an identity verification process, where they're asked for their name, their Social Security number and their date of birth. Then there's a quick identity questionnaire, just to make sure they are who they say they are. That individual is basically saying that they are the owner or approved delegate of the business signing up for payment processing on Square.

Why this is important is that the individual is saying they're the owner or the delegate for their organization for all the locations that exist within that Square account. Said another way, our beneficial owner information exists at the account level, not the location level.

The reason this is important is that if we're talking about a franchise, or really any other multi-entity setup, the single-account model with locations doesn't work. Say a franchise has three corporate locations that the franchise itself owns, and seven franchisee-owned locations: 10 locations total, three owned by the corporate entity and seven owned by franchisees. They would not be able to have a single Square account with all 10 locations set up within it, because the franchisor is not technically an owner of the franchisees' businesses. They're just the owner or delegate of the franchisor corporate entity.

So this is most relevant for franchises where each franchisee owns their respective location. But it can also be relevant in other multi-entity use cases, for instance some food halls or restaurant groups. A general rule of thumb: all the locations within any single Square account have to share the same beneficial owners. If there's a difference in ownership, it requires multiple, distinct Square accounts.

So how, then, does this allow us to work with franchises or other multi-entity businesses? As you probably know, Square is often a great fit for quick-service restaurants: a quick, easy, intuitive point of sale, and all the features we offer on the back end. But for a franchise, the franchisor wants to ensure, one, that they have access to their franchisees' reporting data to properly calculate royalties, sales trends and so on. Two, they want the ability to manage the menu and offer a consistent, branded experience across all the locations. And three, they want the same guest-facing programs available across the locations: say, a single loyalty program or a single gift card system that works across the entire brand and is not siloed by individual Square account or franchisee.

Because of that, we have the Square for Franchises product, which, for context, came from the acquisition of a company called GoParrot, which we acquired back in mid-2022. They were focused on online ordering and mobile app solutions for sellers, realized there was a need for Square to support franchises properly, and started building this solution on top of our public APIs. Once we acquired the company in 2022, we started folding their functionality into the Square ecosystem to make it a first-party product.

Square for Franchises does four main things today, and I'm going to share my screen to show you what some of this looks like. The first is sales reporting. This gives the franchisor visibility into their franchisees' sales. There's what we refer to as the Square for Franchises, or franchisor, dashboard, which is really only for the franchisor. In that portal, they see the sales data from their franchisees' accounts, so they're not required to sign in and out of each franchisee's account individually. They have one login, and they're able to see everything within their umbrella.

Two is menu management: the ability to control the menu, or list of items and offerings, across the different accounts. Three we refer to as loyalty orchestration: a loyalty program that works across the accounts, where customers can earn loyalty points at one location and redeem them at another. And fourth is gift card orchestration: the ability for customers to purchase and redeem gift cards across the different locations, even though those locations may belong to different Square accounts.

Those are the four main features we'll dive into, along with some of the nuances. Then we'll talk about some of the gaps, and some of the implications for third-party integrations and for process.

All right, I'm going to go ahead and share my screen. This is the Square for Franchises dashboard, and this is a demo account of mine for a make-believe business called World Bistro. You'll see the left-hand navigation bar, under Franchise reports. I'm sure some of you have some basic familiarity with the reports available on the general Square dashboard, the one a typical Square account user would have. This reporting is a little more high level than what's available at the individual account level.

In terms of the reports currently offered, we have our sales summary, which gives the franchisor visibility into gross sales across the entire network, the entire brand: gross sales broken down by day of the week and by time of day, and top-line sales metrics such as the number of transactions, number of refunds, gross sales, net sales, discounts, comps, tax and tips. They can see this information for any period of time, from a single day up to a full year.

And just like the regular Square dashboard, they can go back in time from a reporting standpoint. Say they're an existing business that has been on Square, and they then decide to use Square for Franchises: it will retroactively pull all the historical sales data once that franchisee is connected to the Square for Franchises account.

So that's the general sales summary. We can, of course, filter by location, to see how an individual location or a combination of locations is performing. We can also group locations into different reporting groups or units. I have an example here, pricing tier A versus pricing tier B, but you could just as easily think of a group as a region: our Northeast region and all the locations that belong to it. Or we could even have a group for a franchisee: if a franchisee owns more than one location, we can see their performance across the different stores they own.

Then, of course, we can display by location. This is probably one of the most common reports the franchisor will use: seeing, for a particular day, month or year, what each location is bringing in in terms of revenue, number of transactions and net sales.

Sales trends is pretty straightforward. It lets us compare sales from one period of time to the next, specifically gross sales, net sales, average number of orders and total sales size: the change in those four metrics from one period to another, both in aggregate and at the individual store level.

Then we have a royalties and fees calculator. This is definitely a franchise-specific feature. It essentially allows the franchisor to calculate royalties automatically, as long as the royalty is a fixed percentage of gross or net sales.

The franchisor can go ahead and create this royalty fee; I'll just call it Royalty fee, for instance. We can select whether it's based on the net or the gross sales total, what the percentage is, let's say 5%, and which locations are assigned this particular fee. So if they have different rates negotiated with different franchisees, they can set up different rates and set them by store, by location.

And then this generates another report. If I pull this royalties report, you'll see I have a royalty fee I've already created. I want to see royalties owed for the month of January, so I've selected January for my time frame. Now this is a breakdown by Square account, and under that, each location that's part of that Square account, with their total fees.

We can also create fixed fees, like a fixed dollar amount per month, week or quarter for marketing fees. You can also create technology fees, whatever you want to call them. They can either be percentage-based or flat, fixed-dollar-amount fees.

Right now, this is really just a tool for calculating the royalties. It doesn't automate the collection of those royalties, although that's something we're hoping to develop next year. You may notice on the right-hand side, next to the total fee column, there's a little Send invoice option. It takes these line items and pulls them into an invoice template. So if the franchisor wanted to use Square Invoices to collect the royalties, they could, but it's not automated. It's just pulling these in as line items and letting them send that invoice. They have to plug in the name of the recipient and which payment methods they're willing to accept, and then the franchisee has to open the invoice on their side, hit the Pay now link and put in their payment details. It's not an automated process, although that's something we're hoping to change next year.

So that's the royalties and fees calculator. Payment methods is really straightforward: a breakdown of sales by tender type, what's collected in cash, gift card and credit card, payment processing fees assessed by Square, and so on.

Then we jump into the product mix reports: items, categories and modifiers. These reports all appear pretty much identically in terms of the information they display, but they're based on items, categories and modifiers respectively. We'll see, for instance, our top five performing items ranked by gross sales, how they're performing over the course of a typical day, and then the full itemized breakdown: a row for each item, with the item's category, how many times it was sold, the resulting gross sales, net sales, discounts, comps applied and so on. Pretty much all of these columns can be sorted: click the column header and it rearranges in ascending or descending order for that attribute. Similarly with categories, and then with modifiers.

Very important to note, and we'll talk about this more when we go over menu management: what's used to de-duplicate the items, categories and modifiers is the item name. If, for instance, one franchisee has an item called Hamburger and another franchisee has an item called just Burger, those appear as different line items in the report, as opposed to a single item with the sales broken down by location. This can be solved by using the menu management function of Square for Franchises, but just be aware: if a seller is not using it for that purpose, they may have questions about how the de-duplication happens in the item and category reports.

Last but not least is the discounts report. As the name suggests, it reports any discounts that have been applied across the franchisees' child Square accounts: what the discounts are called, how much is discounted and so on.

So again, this is more high-level reporting, visible to the franchisor. The franchisees will not access this dashboard; it's solely for the franchisor, the headquarters or corporate entity. The individual franchisees just interact with their standard Square dashboards.

Now, there's a little more granularity in the filter and display options available at the account level, meaning available to each franchisee when they sign in to their Square dashboard. A few of those offhand: breaking down sales by time of day in more detail, like how specific items sell in the morning versus the afternoon versus the evening; a breakdown of sales by employee; and wage and labor information, like labor versus sales reports, or kitchen performance reports. Those do not funnel up to Square for Franchises, but they still exist at the individual franchisee account level.

The reason I mentioned labor versus sales is that it's typically one of the requests I get from prospective clients. They want to see how their franchisees are managing their labor, so they want that information to show up on this dashboard as well. Just be aware that it's not something that displays currently.

Another note: there is no transactions list. A franchisor can't pull up a franchisee's list of individual payments. It's only the aggregated sales data in the sales reports, as opposed to an individual, line-by-line transaction view.

Now, we do have clients using Square for Franchises solely as a reporting tool. This really depends on the level of centralization of the franchise. It may be a franchise where the franchisor has a few preferred tech partners and gives franchisees the autonomy to choose their own point of sale, and for those using Square, they just want an easier way to pull the sales data, so they use Square for Franchises for that purpose. There are also franchises that don't necessarily care, at an item level, what their franchisees are selling, or about codifying the menu. They just want to know what they're bringing in in terms of gross or net sales for royalty purposes. That's another reason they could use the reporting feature of Square for Franchises and none of the other functionality. So the reporting, I would say, is the base functionality here.

The second component is menu management. I'm not going to go into this in too much detail, because there are plenty of nuances here. Menu management, as the name suggests, is the ability for the franchisor to manage the menu on behalf of their franchisees. In essence, it allows the franchisor to create a template menu that they push down to the franchisees' accounts.

This allows for three things. One, an easier onboarding process: they don't have to build out each franchisee's menu individually when a new franchisee comes on board, because the template populates automatically once they connect. Two, standardization: it's not only pre-filling the menu, it's ensuring the franchisees all start with the same template rather than doing their own thing. And three, ongoing maintenance of the menu: the franchisor has control over what their franchisees are selling and what those items are called, to ensure consistency from a branding perspective.

The way this works is you create a menu, or a number of menus. Think of a menu as just a grouping of items that will be available across a given subset of locations. I built out this World Bistro demo concept to illustrate this. Let's say my chain offers these four different cuisines, and different locations offer different combinations of them. I have my French menu, which is made up of my French categories and, in turn, the French items assigned to those categories. I then assign this menu to the relevant locations. Here, I've assigned my French menu to all of my locations, meaning all those franchisees start out with the French menu populated automatically. But say some of these locations will also have the Japanese menu. I head into my Japanese menu and assign it to my West Coast locations. So the West Coast locations get the French items as well as the Japanese items, and the other locations just have the French items. It's modular in that sense.

Specifically, what syncs as part of the menu build is the item names, the variation names, the prices, the categories, a primary point-of-sale image for the item, and any descriptions. Those are the fields that currently sync as part of menu management.

A few callouts: there are a couple of things that do not sync automatically. One is the point-of-sale layout, just where the tiles appear on the point-of-sale screen; each franchisee manages that on their own. Two is sales taxes: each franchisee is responsible for maintaining their own sales tax rates. That's not something the franchisor does for them through this module. And the third is discounts. While the franchisor can create discounts that funnel down to the franchisees, the franchisees are not restricted from creating their own location-specific discounts. So just a few things to know.

So those are the features the franchisor has control over versus what the franchisee has control over. But we also give the franchisor flexibility to determine exactly what additional level of access, if any, they want to grant franchisees to make their own changes. Imagine a brand where the menu is the same across all locations, but the franchisees have the autonomy to pick their own price points for the items at their location.

Here you'll notice I have a list of permissions. The way to think about it: if I want the franchisees to be able to manage one of these on their own, I toggle it on; if not, I keep it off. So if I want to give franchisees the ability to set their own prices, I toggle on "Allow franchisees to modify item prices". That way, a franchisee can sign in to their Square account, head to the Items tab or the point of sale, update the price of an item, and it saves successfully. The item itself is still being pushed out from the Square for Franchises layer, but they've provided a location-specific override for the price, and that's allowed. If we did not have this checked, it would not allow them to make that price update.

A few of the other ones: allowing franchisees to modify item names. That's not one we typically see used, but if there are regional variations, where the terminology is slightly different due to local dialect, it could be. Allowing franchisees to modify item images. And deleting items, which means fully deleting it, so that franchisee never offers the item. That's distinct from 86ing an item, or marking it as temporarily unavailable, which a franchisee can always do; that's not gated by a permission.

There's also the option to allow franchisees to add their own items. It's something I typically recommend against, because it can open a Pandora's box: if you give them the ability to create their own items, they can create anything they want, and there's a risk of duplicates or items the franchisor doesn't approve.

That said, if we grant any of these permissions, we can also enable email notifications, which send an email to the franchisor, or any other recipients, at the end of each calendar day outlining any changes the franchisees have made to the menus. So if a franchisee adds an item, the franchisor can see what that item is, and then go in and delete it or make any other modifications if they need to.

So the franchisor sets the main menu. They can give franchisees the ability, if they want, to set their own prices, modify images and so on. And a franchisee will always have the ability to manage their menu grid, meaning the point-of-sale layout, their tax rates, and marking items as temporarily unavailable.

Additionally, the franchisor can set discounts at the corporate level. This supports simple discounts, like 10% off for friends and family or a dollar-amount-off discount, but it also applies to time-based and quantity-based discounts. Say that across the brand, the franchisor says: on Monday, we're going to offer a brand-wide promotion, and we want every franchisee to participate. They can create a promotion that is, let's say, time-based: available for a certain date range, time of day or day of the week, and applied automatically to any relevant items or to the check total. These are a few of the types of promotions: check total, item- or category-based, quantity, or buy one get one free.

One thing I think Square for Franchises does particularly well, as opposed to some of our competitors in the space from a franchise management perspective: a lot of tools basically offer an all-or-nothing approach. Other providers will often fully lock down the experience, so franchisees cannot make any changes and everything has to be done through the franchisor, or others give franchisees too much autonomy: they can make too many changes, and the franchisor doesn't have that oversight. Something we do really well is the combination: we establish the template, the franchisor can make a change to an item and have it reflected across all locations, or make a location-specific adjustment, and franchisees still get the flexibility to, say, update their own prices, change their own images or make other local changes.

(Answering a reseller's question: can a franchisor stop franchisees making any menu changes?) It depends on the franchise. A lot of them don't allow franchisees to make any changes, and we just totally lock that down. The only thing we can't lock down is the layout of the menu, meaning where the tiles appear; the franchisee will always be able to move those around. And there isn't a way to prevent them from creating their own discounts. However, if a franchisee does create their own discount and uses it, it will show up in the discounts report, so the franchisor will at least have visibility and can reach out to the franchisee to have them remove it. That's just not something we can technically prevent right now.

All right, another question here: what's the location count for Square for Franchises, the cap on the number of locations? I would say the sweet spot is anywhere from about five to 50 locations. We can technically support up to 100 or 150, but there may be latency issues with the loading of the dashboard pages. Scalability is something we're going to be working on throughout the rest of this final quarter of 2025, as well as into next year. But realistically, in terms of where this is a good fit, five to 50 locations is probably the sweet spot. As you get above 50 locations, some things become a bit more manual or tedious, and past 100 locations there can be latency or loading issues on the dashboard. It's a function more of the number of locations than the number of Square accounts, just a note there as well.

One other quick thing I'll add regarding menus. I'm not sure how in the weeds you are right now with Square's omnichannel menu functionality, but there's been a big migration to a new menu system for Square for Restaurants clients, and Square for Franchises is building support for that right now. Technically, right now, Square for Restaurants supports modifier quantities and combos, which are not yet available on Square for Franchises. We're going to be launching that, I think actually this month, so within the next few weeks. But there can be nuanced differences in what is supported on the regular Square first-party platform versus Square for Franchises, so I definitely recommend reaching out to a member of our team for clarification if there are any questions on that functionality. So that's the menu management piece.

The third component is loyalty orchestration. This simply refers to connecting a Square Loyalty program across the different accounts. Normally, a Square account is a closed-loop system with respect to loyalty: if you have two totally separate businesses, customers obviously shouldn't be able to earn points at one and redeem them at the other. But this establishes that connection for loyalty. The franchisor creates the loyalty program logic from the Square for Franchises dashboard, and it funnels down to the franchisee accounts that are participating in the loyalty program.

In terms of the rules and the way it operates, it's very similar to standard Square Loyalty. It's a phone-number-based program, and customers earn points specifically based on the number of dollars they spend. Square Loyalty at the individual account level also supports per-visit and per-item or category-based earning rules; just note that those are not supported on Square for Franchises right now. If they need a brand-wide loyalty program and they're using Square first party, they would need a points-per-dollar system for earning points. That can be any number of points for any number of dollars spent.

The rewards are pretty similar to what we offer in general Square Loyalty. They can create up to 15 rewards: redeem X number of points for Y reward. Those rewards can be discounts on the entire sale amount; item-based discounts, like a 100% discount on a particular item, say a free smoothie for redeeming 50 points; and discounts on specific items from specific categories.

A question we sometimes get is how this works from a reconciliation standpoint. There's not really a loyalty payables and receivables report. Using my account as an example: say a customer typically goes to my New York Spring Street location and has accrued 1,000 points there. Then they go on vacation, visit my San Francisco location, and want to redeem all of those points. There isn't anything that says: San Francisco, you're giving out this product, but pretty much all those rewards were earned at the New York location. It won't give a reconciliation report from that vantage point. But you can see a loyalty report that shows the number of points earned at each location and the number of points, or rewards, redeemed at each location. We can pull this loyalty report, points earned versus points redeemed, and see the success of the loyalty program: sales attributed to loyalty versus not, and average spend. You can filter it by location, but again, it won't explicitly give an inter-location payables and receivables report from a loyalty discount perspective.

Also, just to note: from a technical standpoint, not all the franchisees have to participate in the loyalty program. If a franchisee wants their own loyalty program that's specific to their location, they can do that. I say "from a technical perspective" because maybe the franchisor doesn't want to allow location-specific loyalty programs, so it can be locked down, but if they allow it, it's something we can support. And again, you can use any combination of these features. We do have brands using this for reporting and menu management that perhaps want franchisees to do their own loyalty, or don't mind if their franchisees have their own local loyalty programs. So we can support that combination as well.

(Answering a reseller's question: is loyalty available for online ordering as well?) Yes. Square Online follows the same loyalty logic. If they're using a partner or an integration for loyalty, there are some nuances, and we'll talk about integrations more towards the end. But if a partner is leveraging the Loyalty API, then theoretically they can support this as well.

So now, gift cards. Very similar to loyalty, we offer a gift card orchestration feature, which allows a customer to purchase a gift card at one location and redeem it at a different location. There is gift card orchestration offered through Square for Franchises, but there are some limitations, and because of those limitations we also have a partnership with eCard Systems. I'll explain the pros and cons of each.

Starting with Square for Franchises gift card orchestration: very similar to loyalty, it simply allows customers to purchase gift cards at one location and redeem them at another. From a customer's perspective, they're using the same gift card, whether that's a physical gift card or an eGift card, at the same business. They don't know they're interacting with different Square accounts, so it's the same experience from a customer standpoint.

However, the difference comes on the back end. We give this gift cards report, which shows how much money is loaded to gift cards at each location and how much is redeemed at each location. You'll see it broken down by physical versus digital gift cards, and it accounts for any refunds to gift cards and any load fees. But again, we're not providing an inter-location payables and receivables report. So if the franchisor is using the first-party Square for Franchises gift card orchestration, just know that they are responsible for reconciling those gift cards in terms of inter-location transfers.

Using my account as an example again: if we purchase a $100 gift card at my New York location, the $100 is deposited to the New York bank account. But if I then redeem it at the San Francisco location, San Francisco is giving out the product but not receiving the funds, because the funds went to the New York bank account. Currently, we're not going to move the funds from New York to San Francisco. We give you these reports, and the franchisor has to use them to figure out how they want to transfer the funds between locations.

We do have a gift card pooling feature in beta. Just to note, it requires Square Checking, so the franchisor needs a Square Checking account. I preface that because, technically, not everyone is eligible for a Square Checking account. And it still only handles the pooling aspect. The pooling beta ensures that wherever a gift card is purchased, whether New York or San Francisco, the money goes to the franchisor's Square Checking account. The franchisor can then distribute funds based on these reports, but the distribution has to take place on their own, outside of the Square ecosystem. So with or without gift card pooling, there's still a manual process involved, either collecting and distributing funds, or just distributing funds, to the franchisees.

Because of this, we have an integration with eCard Systems. You're probably familiar with them already, both from other points of sale you work with and because they're the manufacturer of Square's physical gift cards. But we have an integration with them that's separate from their standard gift card program, called eCard Systems Pooling. Essentially, they leverage our external gift cards API to plug into the Square accounts. With their system, it's separate gift cards: not the Square-branded gift cards they make, but separate gift cards they offer. They still work with the Square hardware, so franchisees don't need different hardware to accept them.

The main benefit is that eCard Systems becomes the source of truth for the gift card data, and they have automatic reconciliation. They offer a central pooling model where, regardless of where the funds are collected, they're deposited to an escrow account tied to the franchisor, and then, based on where the gift cards are redeemed, they perform a true-up and move funds from that central pool to the individual locations at the beginning of the following month. They also have a location-based approach, where the location that sells the gift card gets the money initially, but if a gift card is purchased at location A and redeemed at location B, they move the funds from location A to location B at the beginning of the following month. They offer both models; it's really a function of who gets the money initially, but they handle the reconciliation in both scenarios.

Another benefit, depending on how you look at it: eCard Systems does not charge a load fee. Unlike Square, which charges a 2.5% load fee for adding value to a gift card, eCard Systems has no load fee; it's just a monthly subscription fee that covers the use of their gift cards.

And I'll be transparent: I typically only really talk about the eCard Systems solution for gift card orchestration, because if a franchise doesn't already have an internal accounting process to reconcile gift cards, it's definitely not an easy thing for them to figure out. It's a lot of additional work on their accounting side. So I typically just go with the eCard Systems option because, again, they cover the reconciliation.

Just be aware that the onboarding timeline for eCard Systems is about a month. That's what they've quoted to me.

So those are the four main features. (Reading a reseller's question:) Will the reporting be available with eCard Systems? I'm actually not positive. I know they would have access to an eCard Systems dashboard, which is really what they should be consulting for the gift card data. I'm not sure if it flows in here. I believe it would, but I'm not 100% positive. I can find that out for you.

So those are the main features of the platform as it exists today, and thank you for your patience as we've gone through them. Now perhaps the most important bit: limitations to be aware of, and how they affect integrations, partnerships and process in general. There are quite a few things Square for Franchises does not cover today. Again, it's reporting, menu management, loyalty and gift cards. What I often tell potential clients is: if I haven't covered it in those four buckets, it's not something Square for Franchises currently supports.

So what are the biggest gaps, in my view? There are two that come to mind primarily: one is online ordering, and two is CRM and marketing.

For the online ordering piece: Square Online, Square's first-party online ordering system, is account-specific. A Square account can have a Square Online store, but one Square Online store cannot connect to multiple Square accounts. What does this mean for a franchise? If they want to use Square Online, each of their franchisees will have a separate URL with their menu for ordering: technically separate pages, different online sites. Now, a franchisor will often say that's no problem: we'll have our landing page and build our own location selector, so a customer goes to the general website, selects the location, and it takes them to that location's online store page. That works for many folks. But there are definitely those who want consistency: the franchisor wants full control over the branding and how the online ordering page looks and feels.

In the future, we plan to eventually support a Square Online store that connects to multiple accounts, but I don't think that's going to happen within the next six to 12 months. In the meantime, we have one partner that fully supports a single, unified online ordering experience that connects to multiple Square accounts, and that is Per Diem. Per Diem offers both online ordering and customer-facing mobile apps, and they have native multi-account support, meaning they can have one app for the business and one online ordering site, and based on the location the customer selects, it pushes the order and the payment to the appropriate franchisee's account. Per Diem is the one partner that worked with our partnerships team to support this functionality, so it's the one we can fully recommend.

I have heard anecdotally that Popmenu can support multi-account as well, but they are not officially supported for that purpose, and there could be other online ordering providers that can support this setup; they just haven't officially been vetted. And Square does the processing for Per Diem.

The important thing to note, and this goes for any integration or partner app, is that you want to make sure they can support multi-account, or multi-account OAuth, where one instance of the partner's account can connect to multiple Square accounts, as opposed to simply multiple locations within a single Square account. That's an important distinction. I'm not sure how in the weeds you all are with APIs, but to give an example: a menu item has a separate catalog ID in each Square account. So if a third party pulls in that menu information, it may be the same hamburger item in all the accounts, but when they ingest the data from the individual Square accounts, they'll see them as totally different hamburger items, because they have different item IDs. Those are the API implications a partner has to support: they'd have to build mapping to support a unified catalog. The same goes for customer data. So that's the online ordering piece, and, I think I answered this, Square does the processing for Per Diem.

And then lastly, the customer directory and marketing. This is, I think, one of the biggest gaps we have, and an area for us to improve upon. Right now there is no customer directory or marketing component to Square for Franchises. Each franchisee can obviously build their own customer directory based on the interactions they have with customers at their location or through online sales, and the franchisor, the corporate entity, can do the same for any corporately owned locations. But there isn't a single, unified customer directory that gives a 360-degree view of a customer across multiple franchisees. If Jane Doe goes to franchisee number one and to franchisee number three, they don't have a way of saying: this is Jane Doe's total spend at the brand in its entirety. Each franchisee can only see Jane Doe's spending at their respective locations.

There are definitely plans to build a unified customer directory, and we have some of the starting pieces in place for that. I'm hoping next year we'll really develop that. I think there are still some legal and compliance questions around data sharing, and the implications thereof, that need to be worked out.

Just as a quick recap: the most important thing to note is that franchisees cannot be set up under a single Square account. Each franchisee needs their own Square account for legal compliance purposes. Square for Franchises can help unify those accounts for reporting, menu management, loyalty orchestration and gift card orchestration, either through us directly or through our partnership with eCard Systems. The main gaps are the lack of first-party unified online ordering, although we have Per Diem as a supported partner, and the lack of a consolidated customer directory and marketing.

With marketing as well, each franchisee can do their own Square Marketing; it's just by Square account, as opposed to for the brand as a whole. That said, just like we have an integration with eCard Systems for the gift card gap in our first-party solution, we also have a partnership with ActiveCampaign for marketing and CRM. ActiveCampaign is definitely more for clients with at least, I would say, 20 or 30 locations; it's definitely not for smaller brands. But they offer a solution that connects to each individual franchisee account, pulls in the customer data, and allows the franchise owner to send marketing emails across the board, with delegated permissions so franchisees can send more localized campaigns, pulling from the same customer list. So ActiveCampaign is a supported partner for the marketing and CRM component.

So that's everything I wanted to cover on this initial call from a products and features standpoint.

The most important thing is that Square for Franchises, unlike pretty much all of Square's other products, is not a self-serve product. It's not something a seller can self-onboard for; there's no sign-up for Square for Franchises. If they click a link to find out how to sign up, the page basically says to call the Square sales team or put in a lead form. It has to be done manually by what they just renamed our Enterprise Seller Onboarding team, or ESO. They're within the same organization as our GSO, our global seller onboarding team, but they focus on our upmarket sellers: they do implementation for our largest enterprise clients, working with our enterprise account managers and account executives. But they're also tasked with supporting Square for Franchises implementations of all sizes, so they do need to be involved in the implementation.

Another thing to note is that the typical onboarding timeline for Square for Franchises is about four weeks. That's a general estimate. Obviously, if we're talking about a 100-location brand, it's probably more like three or four months, or even longer, for a full deployment and rollout. If it's a smaller seller, or they're just using this for reporting, it could be as short as a week. But I'd typically recommend quoting about four weeks as the general time frame, and that's also a function of the bandwidth of the Enterprise Seller Onboarding team and how backed up they are from a pipeline perspective.