Square settlements / transactions report
Square's record of what was collected and what was deposited. The Settlements (deposits) report groups payments into a bank transfer; the Transactions CSV is payment-grain. People treat "Total Collected" as revenue and the deposit as matching it.
The shape, how the file is really laid out
The Transactions CSV runs one row per payment with Date, Time, Time Zone,
Gross Sales, Discounts, Net Sales, Tax, Tip, Partial Refunds, Total Collected,
Fees, Net Total, Card, Card Entry Method, Transaction ID, Payment ID, Deposit
ID and Deposit Date. Total Collected = Net Sales + Tax + Tip − refunds; Net
Total = Total Collected − Fees (what Square deposits). The Settlements report
is the deposit view: each settlement/Deposit ID groups the payments and shows
the fee drag and the net amount transferred. Times are in the LOCATION's
timezone, so a multi-location export interleaves several timezones unless
normalized. The Item Sales report is a THIRD grain (one row per line item),
which is why it will not foot to the Transactions CSV.
The traps
Tax and tip inflate Total Collected but are not the merchant's revenue, tips are pass-through and tax is a liability; reading Total Collected as sales overstates the business.
- Every trap in this export, worked through
- The reconciliation anchor, the total the file asserts about itself
- The refusal cases, when to stop and ask instead of guess
Reference: Square Support, Understand Your Square Fees and Deposits (settlements) · Square Support, Transactions / Item Sales CSV column definitions and report grains