Holiday Gift Card Promotions

Around the holiday seasons, many businesses like to offer a promotion on purchasing gift cards.  The traditional offering is a $120 gift card for $100.  Here are a couple ways for your business to sell gift cards at a discount within the Inspire by STX software:

The Accountant Friendly Way

If you ask your accountant for their opinion on how to execute this promotion, this will be their preferred way.  Consider this, your promotion is discounting a future payment towards goods and services and creates false revenue by increasing the value of a gift without receiving payment.  Rather than discount the cost of the gift, create a voucher for $20 and treat it like a discount or promotion.

In addition to being "Accountant Friendly", creating vouchers also greatly benefits your business model and the effectiveness of this promotion.  By creating vouchers, you can add parameters on how the $20 is spent.  Here are a few parameters to consider adding to your $20 voucher:

1. Can only be used on Services (rather than product)
   
2. Can only be used on Tuesday, Wednesday or Thursday (slower business days)
   
3. Can only be used in January and February (slower business months)

For steps on creating a $20 service promotion, check out our  Promotions Guide

Checkout this blog with more details on executing this style promotion,  click here.

The Full Monty Approach

If vouchers seem a little too extra, there is an alternative option.  Simply create a payment type using a name like "Gift Card Discount" then follow these steps:

1. Add a gift for $120 to the ticket
   
2. Add $20 payment using the Gift Card Discount payment type
   
3. Complete the rest of the transaction per usual

Communicate with your accountant that you used this method and that they should plan to deduct the amount paid using "Gift Card Discount" from the sales for the year as well as payments, since you did not technically receive that payment. To generate a report on your Gift Card Discount Payments, use the Payment List Report or Total Sheet Report. 

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