My son is in Cub Scouts and loves to take part in the annual popcorn sales fund raising program. He has always done well but I felt could have done better if we had a way to accept credit cards, so this year we down loaded the Square Credit Card App on my iPhone and improved his sales by 20% which is roughly the amount of revenue we brought in by credit cards.
Square is an amazing service that works with your mobile phone, you simply down load the free app onto your phone, signup, and plug in the free card reader. There is a 2.75% fee when you do a transaction, so for every $100 you bring in there is a $2.75 fee. This is very low fee compared to most traditional credit card processing companies. For companies that have large transactions there is a fixed fee program which is $275/month for unlimited usage.
Here is how I envision an ag Business using the Square technology: Imagine your employee going out to the field to deliver some lubricants at harvest time, the farmer hands the employee the credit card, who swipes it through the reader plugged into his phone, an amount is entered along with any optional details, the farmer signs the phone screen for confirmation and a receipt of the transaction is forwarded via email or text. The funds are then deposited from Square to the ag businesses local bank account.
If you let your imagination go you can come up with many ideas of how this type of technology may be used by ag businesses in the future. Someday your employees may walk around with a phone capable of taking payments while you monitor the sales in real time via your office computer. You may even be able to see that a salesperson has just received a payment at the end of a field via Google Maps.
To learn more visit www.squareup.com
