# Orders API: expose current check owner and ownership transfers (Square for Restaurants)

**URL:** <https://developer.squareup.com/forums/t/orders-api-expose-current-check-owner-and-ownership-transfers-square-for-restaurants/27862>\
**Category:** Feature Requests\
**Tags:** orders-api\
**Created:** [September 16, 2026, 8:58pm UTC](https://developer.squareup.com/forums/t/orders-api-expose-current-check-owner-and-ownership-transfers-square-for-restaurants/27862 "2026-09-16T20:58:06Z")\
**Posts on this page:** 2\
**Page:** 1

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**Author:** ![StAugs](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/s/2acd7d/32.png) [@StAugs](https://developer.squareup.com/forums/u/StAugs)\
**Post date:** [September 16, 2026, 8:58pm UTC](https://developer.squareup.com/forums/t/orders-api-expose-current-check-owner-and-ownership-transfers-square-for-restaurants/27862/1 "2026-09-16T20:58:06Z")

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Single-location restaurant on Square for Restaurants, all staff on personal passcodes, with an in-house app built on the Orders/Payments/Labor APIs for tip attribution and reporting.

**The gap:** Square for Restaurants tracks check _ownership_ — checks are assigned to a team member, can be transferred between servers at the POS, and the per-employee shift reports attribute a transferred check’s sales and tips to its current owner. But none of this is visible in the API. The Orders API exposes only:

- `created_by_team_member_id` — the opener, immutable, wrong the moment a check is transferred
- `team_member_id` on each Payment — who processed the tender

We verified this empirically: printed per-employee shift reports and API data diverge by exactly the transferred checks (the shift report follows ownership; the API can only follow openers or payment-takers). We also diffed the full order payloads of a transferred check against a never-transferred one — byte-identical structure. The ownership data demonstrably exists on Square’s side; it just never reaches the API.

**The ask, in order of value:**

1. A current-owner field on the Order object (e.g. `owner_team_member_id`), maintained through transfers
2. Ownership history (or transfer events via `order.updated` webhooks), so a check that changed hands mid-shift can be attributed by time span

**Why it matters:** any integrator doing tip pooling, tip attribution, or per-server sales reporting has to pick a proxy — opener (wrong after transfers) or largest-payment-taker (wrong when a manager helpfully takes a payment on a server’s check). Both proxies systematically misattribute money between employees, which in tip terms means real pay errors. The shift report proves Square already resolves ownership correctly; exposing that same resolution via the API would let integrations match Square’s own numbers.

Happy to provide order IDs demonstrating the divergence if that helps.

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**Author:** ![ashley-square](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/a/5f9b8f/32.png) [@ashley-square](https://developer.squareup.com/forums/u/ashley-square)\
**Post date:** [September 17, 2026, 9:28pm UTC](https://developer.squareup.com/forums/t/orders-api-expose-current-check-owner-and-ownership-transfers-square-for-restaurants/27862/3 "2026-09-17T21:28:23Z")

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Thank you for the feedback this makes sense! I will pass this along to our product team.