Why you should keep track of gift certificates
If you’re a small business and offer/sell gift certificates (also called gift vouchers) to your customers, chances are you 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, mainly for fraud and accounting purposes. Let’s see why this is necessary:
- You need to prevent customer fraud by reprinting a gift voucher, which causes your business to lose money.
- If you allow customers to redeem a partial amount of the value of the certificate, you must know how much is still available for redemption.
- You should also find out which 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 unique, random certificate number. In fact, to be able 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 to make it look like a new, valid one. In fact, to lessen 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 either case, make sure you have a record of current certificates in use. You can use Microsoft Excel or any spreadsheet program to maintain such a list. You need to make sure that clients can’t see that list, because you don’t want them to know valid certificate numbers. In this file, you may want to specify the certificate’s serial number, date of issue, value of the certificate, amount redeemed, and any other information you find valuable for tracking, 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
For an easier, more automated way to keep track of gift vouchers, you can print a barcode on each gift voucher to seamlessly integrate with your point-of-sale software. Contact your POS software provider to see if they can provide such an integration.
