Switching point-of-sale systems feels risky because your menu, your prices, your regulars, and their loyalty all live inside the old one. The good news: a Clover-to-Square move is very doable for a café, and the parts that transfer cleanly transfer cleanly. The honest news: a few things — loyalty balances, gift cards, saved cards — do not migrate automatically, and the owners who have a bad cutover are usually the ones who didn’t know that going in.
This guide is the plan. It is written for an independent café or coffee shop owner moving a single location (or a few) from Clover to Square, and it is upfront about what carries over and what you rebuild by hand.
If you are still deciding whether to switch, start with our side-by-side on Clover vs Square for a café. This post assumes you have decided and want to do it without losing data.
What actually transfers (and what doesn’t)
Set expectations before you touch anything. Here is the honest inventory:
| Data | Transfers to Square? | How |
|---|---|---|
| Menu items, prices, categories | ✅ Yes | CSV export from Clover → Square item-import template |
| Item variations & modifiers | ⚠️ Partly | Re-map into Square’s modifier structure; complex modifiers may need rebuilding |
| Item photos | ❌ No | Re-upload in Square |
| Customer names, emails, phones | ✅ Yes | Export from Clover → import to Square Customer Directory |
| Saved cards on file | ❌ No | Cannot be moved between processors (PCI rules); customers re-enter |
| Loyalty point balances | ❌ No | Export balances; honour manually or reissue in Square Loyalty |
| Gift card balances | ❌ No | Export balances; reissue as Square eGift cards or honour manually |
| Past sales reports | ⚠️ Export only | Keep Clover reports as records; they don’t import into Square analytics |
The pattern: catalog and contact data move; money-and-balance data does not. Plan your migration around protecting the second category.
Step 1 — Export everything from Clover first
Before you cancel anything, get your data out of Clover while you still have access:
- Item list — export your inventory/items from the Clover dashboard (Inventory → Items → Export).
- Customer list — export your customer directory with names, emails, and phone numbers.
- Loyalty balances — export or screenshot every customer’s current point balance.
- Gift card balances — export the outstanding balance on every active gift card.
- Recent sales reports — pull the last 12 months as a record for accounting; these stay as files, they don’t import.
Keep these files somewhere safe. The two you will lean on most are the item list (to build your Square menu) and the loyalty/gift balances (to make sure no customer is shortchanged).
Step 2 — Build your Square menu with the CSV import
Square does not pull from Clover directly, but it has a clean bulk-import path:
- In the Square dashboard, go to Items & Orders → Items → Actions → Import Library, and download Square’s CSV template first. (You can also export an empty/sample library to see the exact columns Square expects.)
- Open both files side by side and map your Clover export into Square’s template: item name, price, category, SKU, and variations into the matching Square columns.
- Save as CSV and upload it back through the same Import screen. Square validates the file and flags errors before committing, so you can fix formatting and re-upload.
- Spot-check 10–15 items against your real menu — prices, tax settings, and category placement are the usual culprits.
Modifiers (milk choices, syrups, sizes) are where Clover and Square differ most. Simple variations import; richer modifier sets are often faster to rebuild directly in Square than to wrestle into the CSV. Budget an hour for this if your menu is modifier-heavy.
Step 3 — Import your customers
Export your Clover customer list, reformat it to Square’s customer-import columns (name, email, phone), and import it into the Square Customer Directory. This preserves your ability to reach regulars by email or text later.
What it does not preserve: their saved payment cards. Card-on-file data is locked to the original processor for PCI compliance and cannot be exported. Every customer re-enters their card the first time they pay or order on Square — a one-time, normal step, not a loss of the customer.
Step 4 — Handle loyalty and gift cards deliberately
This is the part to slow down on, because it is the part that touches money your customers are owed.
Loyalty. Square Loyalty is its own program, and points do not cross over. Two clean approaches:
- Reissue, by setting each customer’s starting points in Square to match their Clover balance, or
- Honour manually for a short window — give regulars a printed or digital credit equal to what they had — while the new program builds fresh balances.
For how Square Loyalty actually works once you’re on it, see Square Loyalty for cafés.
Gift cards. Outstanding gift card balances are a liability you must honour. Export every active balance from Clover, then either reissue them as Square eGift cards loaded with the same value, or keep a manual ledger and redeem against it until balances run down. Do not cancel Clover until every active gift card is accounted for.
The single rule for a clean switch: no customer should lose a dollar of loyalty or gift balance because you changed systems.
Step 5 — Set up hardware and run parallel before cutting over
Don’t flip the switch cold on a Monday rush.
- Get your Square hardware ready — many cafés run Tap to Pay on iPhone or a Square reader during the move so they aren’t blocked waiting on a terminal.
- Run both systems in parallel for one slow shift. Take real orders on Square while Clover is still live as a fallback. You will surface the missing modifier or wrong tax rate here, not in front of a line.
- Once a full quiet shift runs clean on Square, cut over fully and keep Clover login access (read-only) for a couple of weeks for reference.
- Then cancel your Clover plan — after, not before, you have confirmed gift cards and loyalty are squared away.
Step 6 — Update everything that points at your POS
Your POS change is invisible to customers unless something breaks for them. Close these loops:
- Online ordering links — if you take web or app orders, repoint them at your Square-connected channel.
- Google Business Profile — update the order link so it doesn’t dead-end at an old Clover page (see adding your ordering link to Google Business Profile).
- Receipts and signage — refresh any QR codes or printed links tied to the old system.
- Accounting integrations — reconnect QuickBooks or your bookkeeping tool to Square.
A realistic timeline
For one café location, a sane schedule looks like:
- Day 1: Export everything from Clover; build and import the Square menu; import customers.
- Day 2: Rebuild modifiers, reconcile loyalty and gift balances, set up hardware.
- Day 3 (a slow day): Run parallel for one shift, fix issues, then cut over.
- Following 2 weeks: Keep Clover read-only; monitor; cancel once confident.
It is not a same-morning job, but it is a long-weekend job — not an agency project.
The bottom line
Moving from Clover to Square is mostly a careful CSV exercise plus one genuinely delicate task: protecting loyalty and gift card balances your customers are owed. Export first, import your menu and customers via Square’s template, reissue or honour balances by hand, run parallel for a shift, and only then cancel Clover.
Once you are on Square, the channel that turns those regulars into app users — order-ahead, self-running loyalty, push, eGift cards — is what Tany adds on top: a branded iOS and Android app plus web ordering, live in about a day on your Square POS for $99 CAD/month per location. The POS move gets you onto Square cleanly; a branded app is what you build on it next.