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Why you should keep track of gift cards

If you are a small business and are offering / selling gift cards (also called gift cards) to your customers, chances are you don’t have an integrated gift card solution which can be quite expensive.

So, if you’re offering gift cards to your customers, you need a way to keep track of them, mostly for fraud and accounting considerations. Let’s see why this is necessary:

• you must prevent customer fraud by reprinting a gift card, thereby causing your business to lose money.
• if you allow customers to redeem a partial amount of the certificate value, you need to know what amount is still available for redemption.
• you also need to find out which certificates have been redeemed if you want to evaluate the performance of your certificate program.
• you may also be interested in learning more about the gift voucher: when it was sold, which promotion it was part of, etc …

Track gift cards using a manual code

In this monitoring system, each certificate must have a unique and random certificate number. In fact, to be able to identify a certificate, its serial number must be unique. A random number is also important as it prevents people from reprinting a certificate and using a text formatter, changing its serial number to make it look new and valid. In fact, to reduce the chance of people guessing a valid code, you can also embed letters and other special characters in the serial number.

How to generate gift voucher codes

You can use random code generator software or generate the codes yourself. Either way, make sure you have a record of the certificates in use. You can use Microsoft Excel or any spreadsheet program to maintain that list. You need to make sure your customers can’t see such a list, as you don’t want them to know valid certificate numbers. In this file, you may want to specify the serial number of the certificate, date of issue, value of the certificate, amount redeemed, and any other information that you think is useful for tracking, such as which promotion the certificate is part of, if has been sold or given to the customer, etc …

A simpler option: generate barcodes for gift cards

If you want an easier, more automated way to keep track of gift cards, you can print a barcode on each gift card so it integrates seamlessly with your point of sale software. Contact your point of sale software vendor to see if they can provide such integration.

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