How to Accept Pre-Orders and Catering on Square

Not every café order happens right now. Holiday pastry boxes, next-morning pickups, birthday cakes, and catering trays for an office meeting all need the same thing: a way for customers to order and pay today for something they’ll collect later. Square Online handles this with two related features — pre-orders and order scheduling — and once they’re set up correctly, they run themselves.

This guide walks through exactly how to configure both, how to set prep timing so you don’t get buried, and how to handle catering specifically. It’s written for an independent café or coffee shop already using Square.

Pre-orders vs. scheduled orders: which do you need?

These two features sound similar and are easy to confuse, but they solve different problems:

• Pre-orders are for items that aren’t available yet. You set an availability date, and customers buy in advance — a holiday box that “ships” December 20, a limited seasonal special, a new product launch. Square shows a badge with the fulfillment window so customers know exactly when they’ll get it.
• Scheduled orders are for items already on your menu that the customer wants to pay for now and pick up (or have delivered) at a chosen later time — tomorrow’s 8 a.m. coffee-and-croissant run, a lunch order placed at 10 a.m. for noon pickup.

Catering usually blends both: large-format items, ordered well in advance, with long prep windows. Most cafés set catering up as its own location or category so it doesn’t interfere with regular service.

The quick rule: if the item exists today and the customer just wants it later, that’s scheduling. If the item only becomes available on a future date, that’s a pre-order.

Before you start: turn on automatic fulfillment timing

There’s one prerequisite that trips people up. Square’s pre-order feature requires automatic pickup and delivery timing. In your Square Online settings, enable “Calculate and assign pickup and delivery times automatically.” Manual time assignment won’t work with pre-orders, because Square needs to manage availability windows and prep timing for items that become available on a future date.

Turn this on first. Everything below assumes it’s enabled.

How to set up a pre-order, step by step

1. Open the item. In your Square Dashboard, go to Items & services > Items > Item library and select an existing item or create a new one (e.g. “Holiday Pastry Box”).
2. Enable pre-order. Under Manage checkout, click Add next to “Sell as preorder.”
3. Set availability dates. Choose when the item becomes available for fulfillment — anywhere from 24 hours to 365 days in advance. This is the date customers will actually receive it.
4. Set a cutoff date. Optionally define when ordering closes, so you stop taking orders in time to actually produce them.
5. Assign fulfillment methods. Make sure the item has pickup and/or delivery enabled, since pre-orders attach to a fulfillment method.
6. Save. Square adds a badge on the item page showing the pre-order status and fulfillment window, and customers confirm pickup details at checkout.

One behavior to know: if a customer puts a standard item and a pre-order item in the same cart, the whole order’s pickup adjusts to the pre-order’s fulfillment date. Worth keeping in mind for how you message availability.

Configuring prep time so you don’t get buried

The single biggest mistake with scheduled and catering orders is letting too many land in the same window. Square Online’s automatic timing lets you control the flow with several settings:

• Prep time per order — how long an order needs before it’s ready.
• Lead time — how far in advance customers must order (critical for catering — you might require 24 or 48 hours).
• Order pacing / simultaneous limits — how many orders you’ll accept in a given window, so a holiday rush doesn’t all arrive at 9 a.m.

Set these to match your real kitchen capacity, not your optimism. It’s far better to show “next available pickup: 11 a.m.” than to accept twenty 8 a.m. orders you can’t physically produce. Good pacing is what makes scheduled ordering feel reliable instead of chaotic — the same principle behind a smooth mobile order-ahead workflow at a coffee shop.

Setting up catering specifically

Catering deserves its own treatment because the order shape is so different — bigger, less frequent, longer lead times. Two common approaches:

Option A — a dedicated catering location. In Account & Settings > Business > Locations, add a location named something like “Catering” with its own hours, lead times, and tax settings. This keeps catering rules cleanly separated from your café’s walk-up service.

Option B — a dedicated catering category. Create a “Catering” category in your menu with large-format items (boxes of 12, party trays, urns of coffee), each with a long prep time and a multi-day lead requirement.

Either way, require orders a set number of hours or days in advance, set generous prep windows, and cap how many catering orders you’ll take per day. Catering is high-margin and high-value, but only if you can deliver it without wrecking regular service.

Pre-orders and scheduling are a marketing tool, not just logistics

It’s easy to treat this as plumbing, but scheduled ordering is also a demand tool. A holiday pre-order box you announce two weeks early lets you forecast production and bank revenue before the day. A “pre-order tomorrow’s coffee” prompt smooths your morning rush. A catering offer turns a single customer into a 30-cup order.

The piece most operators miss: you have to actually tell people the offer exists. A pre-order nobody sees doesn’t sell. This is where owning a direct channel pays off — a branded ordering app with push notifications lets you announce a holiday pre-order or catering menu straight to customers’ phones for free, instead of hoping they stumble onto it. A platform like Tany puts pre-ordering, scheduling, and push announcements into your own iOS and Android app on your existing Square POS for $99 CAD/month per location, so the offer and the audience live in the same place.

Always test before you promote

Before you advertise any pre-order or catering offer, run one through yourself:

1. Place a real pre-order or scheduled order from a customer’s point of view.
2. Confirm the pickup window and any cutoff display correctly.
3. Check that the order routes to your kitchen or ticketing the way regular orders do.
4. Verify prep time and pacing behave as configured.

Fix anything that looks off before customers see it. A broken pickup time on a holiday box generates refunds and angry calls on your busiest day — exactly when you have no time to deal with it.

The bottom line

Square Online handles future-dated café orders with two features: pre-orders for items that become available later, and scheduling for existing items picked up later. Turn on automatic fulfillment timing first, set up each item with sensible availability and cutoff dates, and use prep-time and pacing controls so orders arrive at a rate you can actually handle. For catering, give it its own location or category with long lead times. Then test it end to end — and don’t forget to actually promote the offer, because a pre-order only earns its keep if customers know it’s there.

Sources

• Square Support — Sell items as preorders with Square Online
• Square Support — Set up delivery options with Square Online
• Square — Online Ordering for Restaurants