How to track gift certificates

Why you should keep track of gift certificates

If you are a small business and offer/sell gift certificates (also called gift vouchers) to your customers, you probably don’t have an integrated gift card solution which can be quite expensive.

So if you offer gift vouchers to your customers, you need a way to keep track of them, primarily for fraud and accounting purposes. Let’s see why this is necessary:

• You need to prevent customer fraud by reprinting a gift certificate, which causes your business to lose money.
• If you allow customers to redeem a partial amount of the value of the certificate, you need to know how much is still available to redeem.
• You should also find out what certificates have been redeemed if you want to evaluate the performance of your certificate program.
• You may also be interested in obtaining more detailed information about the gift voucher: when it was sold, what promotion it was part of, etc…

Track gift certificates using a manual code

In this tracking system, you need each certificate to have a random, unique certificate number. In fact, in order to identify a certificate, its serial number must be unique. A random number is also important because it prevents people from reprinting a certificate and using a text formatting program to change its serial number so it looks like a valid new one. In fact, to reduce the chance of people guessing a valid code, you can also incorporate letters and other special characters into the serial number.

How to generate gift certificate codes

You can use random code generator software or generate the codes yourself. In any case, make sure you have a record of current certificates in use. You can use Microsoft Excel or any spreadsheet program to maintain this list. You must ensure that clients cannot see this list, as you do not want them to know valid certificate numbers. In this file, you may want to specify the serial number of the certificate, the date of issue, the value of the certificate, the amount redeemed, and any other information you feel is valuable to track, such as the promotion the certificate is a part of, if it was sold or delivered to customers, etc.

An easier option: generate barcodes for gift vouchers

If you want an easier, more automated way to track gift vouchers, you can print a barcode on each gift voucher to seamlessly integrate with your point of sale software. Contact your point of sale software vendor to see if they can provide such an integration.