How can I add a gift card to an invoice?

[Jesspick26]

I purchased gift cards to use and mail to people who purchase one. I do payment through invoices and rarely do sales using my phone/card reader. I've figured out how to activate a gift card with doing an in person sale but I'm having trouble figuring out how to apply a gift card to an invoice. I'm hoping there's a way because I have a lot of out of state customers who would like the option to use a gift card and receive it with their order in the mail.

[EJ_ · Accepted solution]

Hi there, 

At this time, you can’t use a Square Seller's gift card to pay a Square Invoice.

This is a pretty popular request, and we’re working to improve invoices based on feedback from our customers, so I’ll be sharing this request with our product team.

As a workaround, you can apply the balance of the gift card to the outstanding invoice by applying a discount, or by resending a new invoice to your customer all together. 

[ejm]

If I use a discount instead applying the gift card how does this effect the taxable total of the sale?  Can I add a discount to not effect the tax?

[Helen]

@ejm If you apply a discount to an invoices the sales tax will be calculated on the amount of the sale after the discount.

So if you create an invoice for $20 and then apply a 10% discount, taxes will be applied to the subtotal $18.

I hope this answers your question but please let me know if there's anything else I can clarify! 

[BryanR]

Greetings @EJ_,

I might be wrong, but I believe the original question was regarding the sale of a gift card through the invoice system. Regardless, I'm having this issue as the gift cards are not coming up as an item when I'm creating the invoice.

Thanks.

[Helen]

Hi @BryanR! Helen here stepping in for EJ. At this time it's not possible to sell a Gift Card using Square Invoices. You can only sell eGift Cards online or from the Point of Sale app.

Do you sell Gift Cards throughout the year or is it particularly important at this time of year? Any additional information about your business would really help! 

[SMW]

I need to be able to do the same thing. My customers want an actual plastic gift card To give as a gift,which I offer, but often I am behind closed doors in a session or out of the office and not able to swipe their credit card or let them hand off a check. I need to send them an invoice for the gift cards I created so that I could either drop the gift cards to them personally or mail them. This goes on all year.

[SMW]

 Is there a workaround for this? The only thing I can think of is to load the plastic gift card and choose payment type other, make myself a note that I’m invoicing for it. Then go in separately to create an invoice to that customer for that miscellaneous dollar amount ?  But then it will throw off my sales figures correct? 

[Helen]

Thank you @SMW! You could send an invoice for the gift card and the load it afterwards. When you load the card you could apply a 100% discount so that the total amount of that 'sale' (to load the gift card) is $0. I'm not sure if this works for you but it might help in the meantime! 

[SMW]

Hmm ok that’s a good idea. I’ll try it tomorrow as I have 3 gift cards I’m selling and mailing. Thank you!

[Helen]

Sounds good, let us know how it goes! 

[grinderjohn]

Hi - we did exactly what the previous poster said -  invoiced for the cards and then loaded up the cards, and now realize our sales totals are now off. Is there a way to fix this? We actually sold a lot of cards this way, while being closed because of the virus. 

[AshleyK]

Hey @grinderjohn thanks for asking. You are correct, selling the gift cards via invoice and then point of sale, despite discounting the sale 100% will inflate your gross sales. There is no way to correct this as transactions cannot be deleted or altered once completed. 

The only workaround for this, if you choose to continue trying to sell them over invoice, is to mark the invoice as Paid in Point of Sale from the Square Dashboard. This will mark the invoice as paid and will not duplicate any sales, but then you will need to accept a manual card payment from the Point of Sale app to load the gift card and that honestly negates using the invoice feature all together as the payment and gift card load happens on the app.

The best solution is to start selling eGift Cards and to email your customers your checkout link for the cards. This will allow them to check themselves out, cut your workload in half, and also accurately report your sales. 

Let me know if you have any other questions. I'm happy to help answer them to the best of my ability.

[grindershelley]

Thanks Ashley - Here's what we're doing, and we're wondering if eGift Cards will work for this. We have a coffee kiosk in a hospital, and we are encouraging people to purchase gift cards to be used for all the hospital staff, to support them during this crisis. So what we were doing was having people email us with the amounts, and we would invoice them, then put those amounts on a gift card that is kept by our hospital baristas and used for the hospital staff. But that does double all those sales, which doesn't work. So how would this work with eGift Cards? People would purchase them, and then send them to our email address? Thank you for your help!

[AshleyK]

@grindershelley I'm more than happy to help! Yes, and you have a couple options on how to get the eGift Card page out to your customers.

1: You can email all the potential buyers the link to your eGift Card page (found after you set them up on your Dashboard), and then they would be able to purchase and give the eGift Card to you by emailing them to you.

2: Allowing your customers to search your business on our Give & Get Local page. 

Once the gift cards are sent to you, you can then designate them to the baristas to help pay for the medical staff's coffee. 

To get started with Square eGift Cards:

1. Visit your online Square Dashboard.
2. Select Gift Cards from the app menu on the left > eGift Cards.
3. Click Edit Order Page.
4. Configure your eGift landing page, including gift card designs and eGift amounts.
   Note: You can enter preset amounts or allow your customer to center a custom value from $5 to $500.
5. Copy eGift Card URL to share with customers > tap Save.

To use your eGift Cards with Square, make sure you’ve downloaded the most recent version of the app on your compatible device.

Please let me know if you have any other questions!

[NavigateHF]

This thread was started close to 4 years ago. Does it still hold true that you can not directly apply a gift card to an invoice?

Sendario: A friend of a regular client wanted to send him a Christmas gift and purchased a $50 gift card to offset his monthly invoice. How can I apply this to his regularly occurring invoice?

[miap]

You have not answered @Jesspick26 's question, to my understanding.  She (and I) are asking to be able to invoice a customer FOR a gift card, not have them pay WITH a gift card.  There is an anomaly on the invoice page in that all of your item are present in the list to add as line items on the Invoice, EXCEPT the Gift Card option.

I was offered (unmanageable) 'workarounds' to manually type 'gift card' or 'promo' which would not only create a redundant duplicate item, but also STILL require you to separately create another gift card elsewhere (separate from the invoice) if you want to be able to track its use and credit balance.  Not to mention you'd end up with duplicated sales reports for both the invoice 'paid' amount and the gift card 'paid' amount.  Even if you promo'ed the GC, your sales still show that you 'sold' twice as much, simply because you cannot add a GC to an invoice.

Aside from your misunderstanding, your workaround makes no sense.  Yes, you could apply a discount and make their bill disappear, but that will not reflect the use of the gift card on it's balance, thereby creating the chance for perpetual spending on that gift card.

[GHI]

Has anything been done since 2017 to resolve this?  We would like our customers to enter the digits on the plastic giftcards to pay their online invoices.

Thx,  MJ

[Arie]

Hi @GHI,

Thanks for reaching out and letting us know this is still something you're hoping we improve! While we don't have an update on this feature request at the moment, we're continuing to track, and advocate for this suggestion. 

[Chevyk]

This has been a request from your customers since 2017. When is it going to be an option? This is just one of the reasons I use a third part gift certificate program. Can’t invoice and can’t look up a clients gift card or e-gift without a full number. Not even by name. It’s been five years…

[miap]

And then they have an unused gift card which they can keep using, and your reporting on both discounts AND gift card sales is completely skewed.
No. Not a suitable ‘workaround’.