Dive Brief:

• Block’s Square offered a rare look at its product roadmap last week, showcasing plans for 68 new features, including an ACH payment offering and a new inventory synchronization capability with Shopify.
• In the fourth quarter, Square will begin accepting bitcoin for payment and offer a new functionality to add credit card surcharges automatically into Square, according to the roadmap document. The company announced its plans to incorporate bitcoin payments in May.
• In an Aug. 25 blog post, Willem Avé, Square’s global head of product, said the company published its product plans through the first quarter of 2026 to solicit customer feedback and to build trust through more transparency.

Dive Insight:

San Francisco-based Square focuses its point-of-sale business on six primary areas: food and beverage, retail, beauty, services, health and wellness and home and commercial.

Square has scheduled its next biannual product release conference for Oct. 8 in New York, where it will share more details on the pending releases, a Square spokesperson said Thursday.

In health and beauty, Square is adding online booking deposits “to reduce no-shows,” Avé wrote, as well as appointment links through which customers can prepay for their services.

Square also plans to add a “tip before payment” option this quarter, which will allow merchants to configure their checkout process so that customers see the tipping screen before the final payment screen.

In the fourth quarter, Square said it will add its Afterpay buy now, pay later option to online booking site payment options, helping businesses “increase conversion and reduce checkout abandonment.”

“We view the feature set in the product roadmap as evidence of Square’s return to an innovative culture and a path towards both competitive differentiation and upmarket movement,” RBC Capital Markets analyst Daniel Perlin wrote Aug. 26 in a client note.

The company said it intends to update the product roadmap quarterly. In terms of feedback, Square is collecting user comments on a public document. 

A commenter called PizzaDive suggested that Square incorporate AI modeling for sales into its employee scheduling software, Square Shifts, “so we can see total scheduled labor percentages as we add/remove shifts,” PizzaDive wrote. “Currently we do that with an Excel spreadsheet side-by-side with Shifts and it seems like an easy feature to add, since all the sales and labor rate data is already in Square.”

Another commenter, SVLFever, wrote that “as a business owner, I completely agree that it is much easier to ‘deal with some issues’ when you know that some improvement is coming.”

SVLFever also asked Square if the company could add functionality to accept customer deposits for restaurants that host group events. “We do some large group events and being able to take a deposit would be helpful,” SVLFever wrote.