Most studios don't pick Square so much as inherit it — it came with the card reader, and for a while that was enough. Then the client side starts pinching. There's no sane place for session notes, deposits float around disconnected from the work they're holding, and everyone's appointments live on one calendar like the shop has one chair.
The switch to something tattoo-specific isn't hard, but the middle part — actually getting your people out of Square in one piece — is weirdly undocumented. So here's what we've learned doing it.
What Square gives you (and what it keeps)
The export lives in the Square Dashboard under Customers. Look for an import/export option in the actions menu and choose export. You get a CSV with names split into first/last columns, emails, phones, and any custom fields you set up.
Before you trust that file, open it and check three things.
First, your notes. Depending on whether a note was entered on the customer or on an appointment, it may or may not be in the export. Don't find out after you've cancelled the account.
Second, appointment history isn't in there — the customer export is people only. You can export appointments separately from that section of the dashboard if you want a record, but be realistic: your new system almost certainly can't import them, and a spreadsheet archive you never open is usually what that becomes. That's fine. Archives are allowed to be boring.
Third — and everyone asks — stored cards don't transfer. They're held by Square's payment processing and that's that. Clients will re-enter their card wherever you take payments next.
Do the export on a real computer and eyeball the file in a spreadsheet before moving on. You're checking that the row count looks like your actual client base and that the columns you care about aren't empty.
Clean it up first
This is the unglamorous ten minutes that decides whether your new client list feels fresh or like you moved your junk drawer to a new house.
Sort by email and merge the obvious duplicates — the person who booked as "Sam" once and "Samantha O." twice is one client. Delete the ghosts: rows with a phone number and no name, the walk-in from 2023, the test entry you made while setting up the reader. If you wouldn't text them about a flash day, leave them behind.
Names come out of Square split into two columns; some tools want them merged, some don't. A decent importer will recognize Square's "First Name" / "Last Name" headers and handle it. Phone formatting, on the other hand, isn't worth your time — nearly everything stores phone numbers as plain text.
The import
Import screens all work the same way: upload, confirm which column is which, preview, go. The one thing worth testing deliberately is duplicate handling. Make a five-row sample file and import it twice. If you end up with ten clients, stop — you need to know what that tool considers a duplicate before you run 600 rows through it. The right behavior is skipping anyone whose email already exists, so a re-run can't do damage.
On Stencil this lives at Clients → Import CSV. It auto-detects Square's headers (and merges the name columns), you can remap anything it guessed wrong, and duplicates are skipped by email.
Ink history and consent forms
Two things don't belong in this migration, and pretending a CSV can carry them is how they get lost.
Your ink and needle history was never really in Square — it's in your texts and your memory. You can't backfill that, so don't try. What you can do is start logging it from your next session forward: what you used, what got done, how the skin took it, as a note attached to the client's project. A year from now, when someone wants a touch-up color-matched, you'll have the answer written down instead of squinting at a photo.
Signed consent forms are legal documents. They should live wherever signed documents live for you — a drive folder organized by year is honestly fine — with a note on the client record saying where. Resist the urge to type medical details into a general notes field. If a client mentions a sensitivity, note the fact and keep it brief; you're a tattoo shop, not a clinic, and your database shouldn't pretend otherwise.
Cutting over
Run both systems for a week. New bookings go only into the new one; Square stays open, read-only, as the answer key. If a whole week passes and you never needed it, you're done — pull one final full export as an archive, stick it with your backups, and close the account before the next billing date.
The whole thing, condensed: export customers, export appointments separately if you're sentimental, clean the file, test-import five rows twice, run the real import, decide where consent PDFs live, start logging sessions going forward, one week of overlap, archive, cancel.