Finding your Square sandbox transactions

Updated Jun 3, 2026 Payments

You finished a Square sandbox test in TitanCart, the order looks paid in your admin, and yet the Square seller dashboard shows nothing. It is the most common Square setup papercut — and almost always means you are looking at the wrong sandbox dashboard, not that the payment failed.

Why Square sandbox dashboards feel “empty”

Each Square Developer app can spin up multiple sandbox test accounts, and each account has its own isolated seller dashboard with its own Location ID, its own access token, and its own transactions list. They do not share data. A payment processed against test account A will never appear in the dashboard for test account B, even though both belong to the same app.

The default Launch Seller Dashboard button next to your app frequently opens the first test account in the list — which is rarely the one whose Location ID you copied into TitanCart’s Square gateway settings. Result: the dashboard you opened is genuinely empty, but your test transaction landed safely in a different dashboard you have not opened yet.

First, confirm the payment inside TitanCart

Before chasing the Square dashboard, verify the transaction succeeded internally. TitanCart records every gateway response on the order itself, so you do not need Square’s UI to know whether the charge went through.

In wp-admin, go to TitanCart → Sales and open the order in question.
Scroll to the Payment Transactions table near the bottom of the order detail page.
Look at the row for the test charge. The Status column should read completed, and the Gateway Response column will contain a JSON blob from Square confirming the capture ("status":"COMPLETED") along with the Square payment_id.

If the status is completed and the JSON contains a Square payment ID, the test worked. The Square dashboard view is just visual confirmation — the source of truth is the gateway response payload TitanCart already stored.

Tip: Copy the payment_id from the gateway response. You will use it to find the matching row inside the correct sandbox dashboard once you open it.

Finding the dashboard that does have your transaction

1. Open the Sandbox Test Accounts list

Go to developer.squareup.com/apps and click into the app you connected to TitanCart. In the left sidebar, choose Sandbox Test Accounts (sometimes labelled Sandbox on its own).

You will see a table of every test account that has ever been created under this app. Each row shows:

Account name — the human-readable label you (or Square) gave it.
Location ID — a string that looks like L1A2B3C4D5E6F.
Access token — visible behind a “Show” toggle.
Launch Seller Dashboard — the button that opens that specific test account’s dashboard.

2. Match the Location ID to TitanCart

In a separate tab, open TitanCart → Settings → Payment Gateways → Square and copy the value of the Location ID field. Switch back to the Sandbox Test Accounts list and find the row with the matching Location ID.

Click the Launch Seller Dashboard button on that row. The dashboard URL that opens will look like https://squareupsandbox.com/dashboard/... — note squareupsandbox.com, not squareup.com. Sandbox and production dashboards live on different domains.

3. Find the transaction

From the sandbox dashboard, go to Transactions in the left navigation. Filter by today’s date if needed. Your test charge will be there — match it to the payment_id you copied from TitanCart’s gateway response, or just match by amount and timestamp.

The cardinal rule: same row, every time

The access token and Location ID you save in TitanCart’s Square gateway settings must come from the same row in the Sandbox Test Accounts table. Mixing the access token from one test account with the Location ID from another is the second-most-common Square setup mistake. It does not produce a configuration error — Square will happily accept the API call and route the payment to whichever test account owns the Location ID, leaving you debugging a “missing” payment that is sitting in a dashboard whose token you no longer have.

Important: If you ever rotate or regenerate the access token, copy the new token from the same row whose Location ID is configured in TitanCart. Do not assume tokens are interchangeable across test accounts.

Going to production

None of the sandbox dashboards have any relationship to your live Square account. When you flip TitanCart’s Square gateway from sandbox to live mode, you swap in the production access token and Location ID from squareup.com/dashboard (no “sandbox” in the URL). Live transactions show up there, never in any of the developer-portal dashboards.