Connect Square to Parabola

Pull Square transactions, refunds, customers, catalog, and locations into Parabola to automate reconciliation, accounting, and multi-location reporting.

Square is a payments and commerce platform used by retail stores, restaurants, and service businesses to take payments in person and online. Connecting Square to Parabola lets ops, finance, and retail teams pull transactions, refunds, customers, and catalog data into the same flows they use for accounting, multi-location reporting, and customer marketing, without manual exports or engineering work.

Pull from Square

The Pull from Square step connects directly to your Square account and pulls data on transactions, refunds, customers, catalog items, employees, and locations. You pick a data type and timeframe, and Parabola loads the results into your flow for cleaning, joining, and routing.

How to authenticate

1. Add a Pull from Square step to your flow.

2. Click Authorize. A pop-up opens asking you to sign in to your Square account with your email and password.

3. Approve the connection. Once it succeeds, the step is ready to pull data.

By default, a freshly connected step pulls Location Details — the first option in the data type dropdown.

Configure your settings

Open the Data Type dropdown to pick what to pull:

• Location Details — every Square location on the account, with name, address, currency, status, and merchant ID.
• Transactions — payment records by transaction.
• Refunds — refund records tied to original transactions.
• Catalog — full catalog including items, variations, categories, discounts, taxes, and modifiers (92 columns).
• Customers — customer profiles with contact info and preferences.
• Employees — employees with role and authorized locations.

For Transactions and Refunds, you also configure:

• Timeframe — Last 24 Hours, Last 1 Day, Last 7 Days (default), Last 30 Days, Last Month, Last 3 Months, Last 6 Months, Last Year, This Year, or a Custom Range. Custom Range expects dates in MM-DD-YYYY format (for example, February 28, 2020 is 02-28-2020).
• Time Zone — pick the timezone Parabola should use to interpret your timeframe. Defaults to Africa/Abidjan, so set this on every flow.
• Day Start Time — defaults to 12:00 AM.
• Filter Locations (under Advanced Settings) — limit results to one or more Square locations.
• Offset — shift the relative timeframe forward or backward by days, weeks, or months.

Within Transactions and Refunds, you can also drill down into subsets like Tenders, Line Items, Refunds, Transactions Report, and Item Details Report.

Available data

• Location Details — name, address, currency, status, capabilities, and merchant ID for every Square location.
• Transactions — created_at, transaction_id, device.id, device.name, tax_money.amount, total_collected_money.amount, net_sales_money.amount, location_id. Subsets expose tenders, line items, and detailed item-level reports.
• Refunds — same column set as Transactions, with subsets for original transaction tenders, original line items, refunds report, and item details report.
• Catalog — items, variations, categories, discounts, taxes, modifiers, and modifier lists (92 columns).
• Customers — id, created_at, updated_at, given_name, family_name, email_address, reference_id, preferences.email_unsubscribed, group ID and name, address fields, and phone_number.
• Employees — id, first_name, last_name, status, email, role IDs, and authorized location IDs.

Inventory is not exposed in the native step. To pull inventory levels, use Pull from an API against Square’s Inventory API with your Square access token.

Common use cases

• Reconcile Square sales to your bank: Pull transactions and refunds, group by location and date, and reconcile deposits inside NetSuite or QuickBooks Online so finance can post Square revenue and fees cleanly.
• Combine in-person and online sales: Union Square transactions with Shopify, Squarespace, or Magento orders to build a single multi-channel revenue report for executives.
• Sync customers to marketing: Push Square customer profiles into Klaviyo, Mailchimp, or HubSpot so loyalty and lifecycle campaigns reach the right audience.
• Compare performance across locations: Group Square transactions by location_id, then drop the result into Google Drive, Smartsheet, or a Slack digest for store managers.
• Audit refund volume and discounts: Pull refunds alongside catalog discounts to flag stores or items with abnormal refund or discount patterns, then alert ops in Slack.
• Send raw data to your warehouse: Push Square transactions and customers into Snowflake, BigQuery, or Redshift for cohort and lifetime-value analysis.

Tips for using Parabola with Square

• Set the time zone before relying on date filters. The default is Africa/Abidjan (UTC+0). For most US merchants, you want America/New_York, America/Chicago, America/Denver, or America/Los_Angeles. Otherwise “yesterday” won’t mean what you expect.
• Timeframes shift to full units of time. “Last 7 days” starts with the most recent full day, not the partial day you’re in right now. Same for “Last 3 months.”
• Use Filter Locations on multi-location accounts. Pulling all locations works, but if you only need one store, filter at the source to keep payloads small.
• Convert money values to dollars. Square returns currency amounts in minor units (cents). Divide by 100 in a Calculation step before joining with other systems or formatting as currency.
• Pull inventory via the API step. The native step doesn’t expose inventory. Use Pull from an API against Square’s Inventory API with your access token.
• Match cadence to use case. Hourly for live store dashboards, daily for finance reconciliation, weekly for catalog and customer reporting.

FAQ

Can I push data back into Square?

The native step is read-only. To create or update customers, catalog items, or other Square objects, use a Send to an API step pointed at the relevant Square API endpoint with your access token.

Does Parabola support Square webhooks?

The native step is API-pull only. For event-driven flows (new transaction, refund, customer), point a Square webhook at Parabola’s webhook trigger on a separate flow.

How do I pull inventory levels from Square?

Use the Pull from an API step against Square’s Inventory API with your access token. The native step doesn’t yet expose inventory.

Why is my date range returning unexpected results?

Two common causes: the Time Zone is still set to the default Africa/Abidjan, or the timeframe rolled to a full unit of time (so “Last 7 Days” excludes today). Set your timezone explicitly and double-check what window you actually need.

Can I pull data from multiple Square accounts in one flow?

Yes. Add multiple Pull from Square steps and authorize each one against a different Square login, then union the results downstream.

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With Square and Parabola connected, the daily reconciliation and multi-location reporting your team rebuilds every morning run on a schedule, with clean data landing in the systems where finance, marketing, and store ops actually work.