Setting Up a Gift Card Department
A gift card department turns every product filed under it into a gift card, so your staff can activate new cards and reload existing ones at the register. You set this up once on the department rather than on each product.
How Gift Card Departments Work
Access requirements. You need edit access to "Departments" to create or change one. Creating the tax category it needs is a separate settings permission, so if you don't have that, ask whoever manages your account settings to add the tax category for you.
The gift card setting lives on the department , not on individual products. Turn it on once and every product filed under that department is a gift card.
Three things have to be true before you can turn it on: the department has been saved at least once, its Default tax category is one with no tax rates attached, and its Revenue type is Gift Card .
Turning the toggle on marks every product already in the department as a gift card, and turning it off unmarks them again. Products you add to the department later are marked automatically.
A gift card product doesn't ring up at a fixed price. When a cashier adds one to a sale, the terminal asks for the card number and the amount to load.
Where to Access Each Feature
To… | Go to |
Create a tax category with no tax rates | Settings → Taxes |
Create or edit a department | Products → Departments |
See the gift cards your stores have issued | Products → Gift cards |
Creating a Tax Category With No Tax Rates
A gift card department has to point at a tax category that has no tax rates attached. You may already have one — check the Tax categories table on the Taxes page, where the Tax rates column is empty for any category that qualifies. If you have one, skip to the next section.
Go to Settings → Taxes .
In the Tax categories section, click Create tax category.
In the New tax category dialog, enter a Name you'll recognise later, such as "No tax".
Enter a Tax code . Both Name and Tax code are required; Description is optional.
Leave the Tax rates field empty. An empty Tax rates field is what makes this category usable for gift cards.
Click Create .
Setting Up the Gift Card Department
Go to Products → Departments .
Click + New department to start a new one, or click an existing department's name to open it.
For a new department, enter a Name, then click Save. The gift card settings don't appear until the department exists.
Under Accounting setup , set Default tax category to your tax category with no tax rates.
Set Revenue type to Gift Card .
Click Save .
A Gift card setup section now shows a Purchasable as Gift card toggle. Turn it on.
Click Save. Every product in this department is now a gift card.
Important: the Purchasable as Gift card toggle stays hidden until both the tax category and the revenue type are set as described above. Until then, the Gift card setup section shows a message telling you what's missing instead of the toggle.
Note: if the department already has products in it, turning the toggle on converts all of them to gift cards at once. Use a department that holds only the products you want sold as gift cards.
Adding Gift Card Products to the Department
Once the department is set up, any product you file under it becomes a gift card — there's nothing to turn on at the product level. Moving an existing product into the department makes it a gift card, and moving it back out makes it an ordinary product again.
Set the price on a gift card product to $0.00. Leaving the price blank can cause issues elsewhere in Back Office, so don't skip setting it.
What It Looks Like at the Register
When a cashier adds a product from a gift card department to a sale, the terminal opens an Enter gift card screen instead of adding the item at its shelf price.
The cashier scans the card or types its code — the screen prompts "Scan or enter gift card identifier manually below" — then taps Confirm to check the code.
If the code is new, the buttons change to Rescan and Activate gift card . If the code already belongs to a card, the screen reads "Oops! Looks like this gift card is already being used." and offers Reload card instead.
Activating a new card shows a Set gift card ID screen confirming the Gift card number , then a load screen with an Amount field.
Reloading an existing card goes straight to a reload screen with a Reload amount field, showing the Current balance and the Reloaded balance side by side, plus the card's Expiration date if it has one.
The cashier types the amount and taps Confirm . Confirm stays unavailable until the amount is above zero, and there's no minimum or maximum beyond that.
The screen notes that the amount "will only be applied once the payment is completed" — nothing reaches the card until the sale is paid for. Whatever amount the cashier enters becomes the price of that line on the sale.
Cards activated or reloaded this way appear under Products → Gift cards, with the store that sold them shown in the Location column.
Troubleshooting
You can't find the "Purchasable as Gift card" toggle: save the department first, then check both conditions — its Default tax category has to be one with no tax rates, and its Revenue type has to be Gift Card . Until both are set, the Gift card setup section reads "Please assign this department to a tax category with no tax rates and set the revenue type to gift card to make it a gift card." in place of the toggle.
The toggle vanished after you changed the tax category or revenue type: the department is still set up as a gift card department — only the toggle is hidden, because the conditions for showing it are no longer met. Put the tax category and revenue type back to see the toggle again and change it.
The toggle vanished and nobody changed the department: check that its tax category still exists. Deleting a tax category clears it from every department that used it, which takes that department below the conditions for showing the toggle.
You can't edit the name of a department called "Gift card": the Name field is locked on that one department, and its products are treated as gift cards whatever the toggle says.
A product in the department isn't behaving as a gift card at the register: check that the Purchasable as Gift card toggle is still on and saved, and that the product is really filed under this department.