If you're looking for Square's "enable auto-generated purchase orders" toggle and can't find it: you're not missing it — Square suspended the feature. A Square employee confirmed in the Seller Community (September 2024) that "the ability to automatically-generate Purchase Orders is currently unavailable while our team makes improvements to the feature," and as of mid-2026 we could find no announcement that it has returned. Square's marketing pages still describe sending purchase orders automatically from stock forecasts, which is why sellers keep hunting for a switch that isn't there. Check your own account first — features roll out unevenly — but if the toggle's gone, this page covers what you can actually do.
What still works in Square
The pieces around the missing feature are intact:
- Low stock alerts: set per-item thresholds (Dashboard → Items → select items → Actions → Update low stock alert), per location or across locations; flagged items show in your stock overview
- Manual purchase orders: Items & services → Inventory management → Purchase orders → Create — vendor, delivery location, expected date, items with quantities and unit costs, emailed to the vendor from Square
- Receiving: full or partial, with unit costs saved and FIFO-based COGS
So the loop Square currently supports is: alert fires → you notice it → you build the PO by hand → you send it. The step Square advertised — the system drafting the PO for you when stock crosses the threshold — is the suspended part. The full workflow walkthrough is in Square Inventory Purchase Orders.
The workaround, honestly assessed
What sellers do in practice:
- A weekly PO-building session. Filter the stock overview to flagged items, group by vendor, build one PO per vendor. Workable discipline for a modest catalog; the failure mode is the week nobody has time.
- Export and spreadsheet. Export inventory, sort by the gap between stock and threshold, paste into vendor emails. Faster to build, harder to keep receiving accurate — and if you skip Square's PO object, you also lose the cost capture that keeps COGS honest.
- Wait for the feature. It was a paid-tier selling point, and sellers in the community thread upgraded specifically for it. There's no public timeline. Planning your ordering process around its return is hope, not a process.
Note also two documented constraints that survive even if auto-POs return: Square purchase orders support whole-number quantities only (no ordering cheese by the half-pound), and editing a PO doesn't re-send it to the vendor — your copy and theirs can diverge silently.
The bigger gap the toggle was standing in for
Even fully restored, auto-generated POs from a static threshold solve the smallest part of replenishment. The threshold itself is still a number you typed — not computed from sales velocity, delivery lead time, or seasonality — and the PO it generates still goes out one-way: nothing captures the vendor's confirmation, the short, the substitution, or the price change that comes back.
A replenishment layer beside Square does the whole job: reorder points computed per item from your actual Square sales and each vendor's lead time; suggested orders that respect pack sizes and what's already inbound; per-vendor sending over email, text, or EDI; replies tracked on a living purchase order; receiving reconciled against the confirmed state. That's what LineNow runs on top of Square — the structural argument is in the Square procurement layer guide, and you can sanity-check your thresholds today with the free reorder point calculator.
Sources checked
- Square Seller Community: auto-generated purchase orders unavailable (Square staff post)
- Square Support: Create inventory alerts
- Square Support: Create purchase orders with Square for Retail
- Square Retail features page (advertised automatic purchase orders)