If you run Square as your POS, you can:
- Import your team as Timely employees in one click
- Pull timecards weekly so the Labor dashboard shows scheduled-vs-actual variance
- Keep Square as the source of truth for the roster — new hires you add in Square appear in Timely on the next sync
Connecting Square
Settings → Integrations → Square → Connect.
You'll be redirected to Square's OAuth screen, asked to grant Timely access to:
- Read employees
- Read timecards (clock in / clock out events)
Once you accept, you'll land back on the Square integration page in Timely with a green "Connected" status. The connection is per-org — one Square OAuth grant covers all your locations.
Importing your team
After connecting, click Import Employees. Timely fetches your active Square team members and shows a mapping screen.
The mapping screen has two columns:
- Existing Timely employees — people you've already added to your Timely roster
- Square team members — what came back from Square
Timely auto-matches by email or phone. Anything unmatched shows as "ready to import" — confirm and it becomes a new employee row in Timely.
You can re-run Import Employees any time. New Square hires appear as ready-to-import; previously mapped employees update in place (name changes, role changes, etc. flow through).
Pulling timecards
Once your team is mapped, enable Sync Timecards. Timely pulls each location's clock-in/out events on a weekly cadence (Monday morning by default for the prior week).
Timecards feed two things:
- Labor dashboard at
/dashboard/labor(Business+) — shows scheduled hours vs. actual hours per employee per day, and computes labor cost variance. - Sync banner on the schedule grid — alerts you when actual hours diverge significantly from scheduled.
If Square employees in different locations need to be matched to specific Timely locations, do that on the mapping screen — each Timely employee can only belong to one location, so set it correctly the first time.
Disconnecting
Settings → Integrations → Square → Disconnect. Two options:
- Disconnect only — stops syncs but leaves all imported employees and timecard history intact in Timely.
- Disconnect and remove synced data — deletes the timecard history. Imported employees stay (they're just regular Timely employees at this point).
If you reconnect later, you'll need to re-map the employees once. Mappings aren't restored automatically because Square's internal IDs may have changed in the interim.
Troubleshooting
"Sync failed" notice — most common cause is an expired access token (you changed your Square password). Click Reconnect.
Employees missing from import — Timely only pulls active Square team members. Inactive / archived team members are filtered out.
Timecards not appearing in Labor dashboard — check that the employee is mapped. Unmapped Square clock-events have no Timely employee to attribute hours to.