Gift Cards

It is very easy to start using gift cards in OrderTrac. It does not take any fancy equipment or gift cards to do so. The only requirement for your gift card is that it have a unique ID. You can order a batch of gift cards from any company, just search “custom gift cards” online and you will have many options to pick from.

Ordering Gift Cards

You can order gift cards with your logo on them or just plain gift cards. You can choose for the cards to have a barcode, magnetic strip, or just the id printed on the back. All of these will work with OrderTrac. The barcode or magnetic strip just makes typing the gift card ID into a text field easier. The easiest option to use is the barcode since you may already have a barcode scanner for labels or UPC items in OrderTrac. You will need a magnetic strip reader if you want to use a magnetic strip gift card.

When you order your gift cards, you will have the option to specify a gift card id range. If you order 100 gift cards, you can tell them to give the cards and id for 1-100 or 10001 to 10100, it doesn’t matter. The only thing that does matter, is when you order another batch of gift cards, you MUST not order a batch with an ID that overlaps any previous batches. Each gift card ID should have an ID that no other gift card you have ordered has.

Gift Card Inventory

When you sell a gift card, you will want to register the gift card in OrderTrac so you can start tracking the balance of that gift card.

The best way to do this is to create a POS Item under Point-of-Sale > POS Items > New POS Item. At the very top of the page, you can select Gift Card as the type. Then, you can enter a unique UPC, description, etc. If you are creating a $20 gift card, you would want to set the price to $20.

Click Save to finish setting up the gift card inventory.

Loading Gift Cards

The next step is loading a gift card. You aren't really altering the gift card in any way by added the balance to a computer chip in the gift card. The gift card is really nothing other than a piece of plastic with a unique number on it. OrderTrac is just going to track how much money is associated with that gift card number. When the gift card is sold, we need to add a balance to that number. When the card is redeemed, we need to deduct from the balance.

You can now sell a gift card through the POS register or on a sales order. Either way, as soon as you add the gift card to the sale, the system will detect it is a gift card, and automatically prompt the user to enter the gift card number to load the card:

Grab an unused gift card from you stack of gift cards, and enter the gift card number. If you gift card numbers are very long, this is where it is handy to have gift cards with a barcode on them so you can easily use a barcode scanner to enter the card number for you rather than typing it in manually and risking entering the number incorrectly. Click Save to complete the gift card loading process.

We can see on the completed POS Transaction what the gift card number was:

The process is the same for selling a gift card on a sales order by adding a POS Item to the sales order.

You can also manually load a gift card. To do this, click Customers > Gift Cards > New Gift Card. The rest of the loading process is the same: Enter the card number, the amount, and click Save.

Redeeming Gift Cards

Now that the gift card is "loaded" and the customer has taken it, it is ready to be redeemed. When the customer returns with the gift card to make a purchase, you will add it as a payment.

You can redeem gift cards as a payment on either POS register transactions or on sales orders. Here we will add a new payment to a sales order by clicking Add Payment > Gift Card > Enter Card. Notice you can click the Check Balance button once you have entered the card number to verify the balance before attempting a payment:

Click Save to complete the payment. The payment will be successful as long as the gift card balance is greater than or equal to the payment amount.

Now we can see the gift card payment on the sales order, and the balance of the sales order was reduced by $20.

Gift Card History

At any time, you can view a log of a gift card to see when the gift card was issued, who issued it, any time it was redeemed and who redeemed it. Just click Customers > Gift Cards, enter the gift card number and click Search.

Here we can see when the gift card was issued and redeemed, and we can see the balance is now $0.

Rewards Cards

Rewards cards are gift cards that are assigned to a customer and can have an expiration date. The process is exactly the same, but when you load the gift card, choose Rewards Card as the type instead. When creating a rewards card, you must select the customer so you can identify which customer has earned the rewards. You can also update when the rewards expire:

You can select a default expiration date in Settings > Location Settings > General > Rewards card expiration. For example, if you set the default to 365 days, any time you create a new rewards card, it will default the expiration to 365 days from the date it was loaded.