Guide

How to Read Square's Discount and Comp Reports

Every restaurant gives some food away. A dish goes back to the kitchen and gets comped, a regular gets a discount, staff eat during a shift, a promo runs for a weekend. Square tracks all of it, but the reports that show it are easy to misread, and the numbers they show aren't always the cost you actually took on.

Here's how the discount, comp, and void reports work, and what they leave out.

Discounts, comps, and voids are different things

Square treats these as three separate actions, each with its own report.

A discount reduces the price of an item or a whole ticket, by a set dollar amount or a percentage. A comp removes a specific item from the bill as a goodwill gesture or to fix a mistake, like a dish that came out wrong. A void removes an item or charge, typically to correct an error before the sale is final.

In practice, comps work better for a single problem item, since they only affect that item. A discount applied to a ticket can reduce the whole bill when you only meant to take care of one dish.

Where to find the reports

All three reports live in your Square Dashboard under Reports. The discount report only has something to show once you've created discounts in the Dashboard. Comp and void reports stay empty until you turn on comps and voids in your Dashboard settings, and they're only available in the Dashboard, not in the point of sale app.

The discount report lists your most used discounts and the total discount amount for the date range you choose. The comp and void reports track items and charges removed from customer bills, which makes them useful for spotting mistakes, seeing how your team is handling tickets, and documenting losses.

Name your discounts, or you can't track them

If your team uses an open or variable discount without a clear name, the report can tell you how much was discounted but not why. Give each discount a specific name, like "Happy Hour," "Staff Meal," or "Loyalty 10%," so the report shows which ones are actually being used.

Renaming matters here too. If you rename a discount, comp, or void, Square treats the new name as a separate entry in reporting. The old name keeps its history and the new name starts from zero, so one discount can show up as two lines.

Why comps overstate what you gave away

This is the biggest gap in the comp report. When you comp an item, Square records the item's menu price, not what it cost you to make. A cocktail that costs under a dollar in ingredients but sells for $7 shows up as a $7 comp.

That makes your comp total look much larger than the real cost to the business. The menu price tells you how much revenue you gave up, which is useful to know, but what actually left your walk-in is the food cost. If you want to know what comps are really costing you, multiply comped items by their cost, not their price.

Why discounts leave pennies in your category reports

If you see odd cents in your category sales, like $412.37 in a category where every price ends in 0 or 5, discounts are usually the reason. When a discount isn't tied to a specific category, Square spreads it across every category in that ticket, in proportion to each category's share of the sale. A 10% discount on a ticket with a burger and a beer gets split between Food and Drinks, which leaves fractional amounts behind.

The totals are still correct. The pennies just mean some of the discounts in that category came from ticket-level discounts rather than category-specific ones.

Net sales is the number to watch

Square's sales summary counts discounts and comps as deductions from your sales. That's why net sales, which excludes discounts, comps, refunds, and taxes, is usually a better read on how a restaurant actually did than gross sales. Gross sales can look healthy on a day when a lot of food went out comped or discounted.

Discounts hit profit harder than they hit price

A discount comes entirely out of your margin, because the item costs the same to make no matter what you charge for it.

Say a dish sells for $10 and costs $3 to make, leaving $7 in profit. Take 20% off, and the customer pays $8. Your cost is still $3, so profit drops to $5. The price fell 20%, but profit fell nearly 29%. The thinner an item's margin, the bigger that gap gets.

To see which menu items can afford a discount and which can't, add your prices, costs, and units sold to the menu item profitability calculator. For a walkthrough of Square's other reports, see how to read your Square sales reports and the Square modifier sales report guide.

See what this looks like

Below is a live Flumen restaurant dashboard. This is the single page view of the numbers that would otherwise require navigating several Square reports and a separate spreadsheet for costs.

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Frequently asked questions

Why does my Square comp report show more than the comps actually cost?

Square records comps at the item's menu price, not its food cost. The comp report shows revenue you gave up, while your actual cost is what the comped items cost to make.

Why are there pennies in my Square category sales report?

Discounts that aren't tied to a specific category are spread across every category on the ticket, in proportion to each category's share of the sale. That split creates fractional cents in category totals.

What's the difference between a comp and a discount in Square?

A comp removes a specific item from the bill, while a discount reduces the price of an item or the whole ticket by a dollar amount or percentage. Each has its own report in the Square Dashboard.

Why is my Square comp report empty?

Comp and void reports only appear after you turn on comps and voids in your Square Dashboard settings. They're also only available in the Dashboard, not in the point of sale app.

Want to understand the rest of Square's reports? See how to read your Square sales reports

See how the modifier sales report works and where it stops