Presently it seems we need to calculate daily Gross Sales, Net Sales, etc. by pulling data from the Orders API. This is convoluted because it requires a fair amount of logic to calculate the same values shown in the Dashboard. It also doesn’t work well over longer time frames because it requires calling so much data. Since this data is already being served to the dashboard, it’d be awesome to have it available in the Developer API.
I suspect this isn’t at all what you’re looking for, but my understanding is that most people do reports by accumulating data on successful transactions locally, eg: in an SQL database, and then running queries on that. You can get webhooks to POST you the latest transactions as they happen, and then you’ve always got an instantly available database for queries. You might choose to keep the minimum of information, just to keep things secure.
With this webhook approach, you have ability to generate reports of any sort locally, so there’s no delay and infinite customizability.
This is pretty much exactly what I’m working on now as an alternative solution to a “Reports” API endpoint. Setting up webhooks is something I yet hadn’t considered for getting updates but I think it’s a great idea.
I agree there are definitely some pros to this approach in terms of customizability! I’m just lazy so I was hoping there would just be an endpoint I could hit to get daily sales metrics since it looks like Square already computes it for the Dashboard anyway.
