Dive Brief:

• Square Tuesday launched its Square Dashboard app that allows sales tracking in real time.

• The app provides sales summaries, sales comparisons, data on bestselling products, and performance by store location.

• The company also said that it’s piloting a payroll product that allows businesses to track payroll and taxes and clock workers out from the point-of-sales system.

Dive Insight:

Square has found that its small-business customers are fond of its analytics capabilities; the suite of growing apps for them has helped put smaller retailers on a somewhat more equal footing to the big guys. Data and patterns are key to making business decisions and staying nimble. Of course, the retailers now will have to employ the data well.

As Brett Wickard, founder of “lean retail” software company FieldStack, has told Retail Dive: “Everybody has data. Using it is the hard part.”