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.