Clearing Gift Cards

[SIDL]

I am a sole proprietor massage business. I don't sell a lot of plastic gift cards or e-gift cards. But this is changing rapidly. I think the availability to purchase gifts for clients with the card services is wonderful but it is a pain in the patooty!

Currently I am having to keep track of them manually (on paper). Why? Because when checking someone out if they don't have all of the documentation I can't clear them. Then, I have to remember to use my computer later to find the information, which is not easy*, and clear the balance or enter a new balance for them. Which is another step manually.

* This is a huge pet peeve at this time. Just locating the purchased gift cards and

e-gift cards to clear them is exhausting! 

I propose a Gift Card list be available in the Square Checkout App with full identifying information of the Gift purchase including the balance and a way to make the proper balance adjustments to each individual gift. Obviously this may be done manually, but so much more conveniently for the client and me.

Perhaps an automated receipt would be sent to the purchaser with a thank you.

When the balance is zero it should be moved to a completed gift list within the app.

This would be so helpful to have a simple place to review how many outstanding gifts are waiting in the wings. As a small business, knowing I have these financial obligations is important.  I have to be able to support these purchases for future sessions.

Now, I am not a tech wizard but surely this challenge is doable.  Hopefully one of your team members will be happy to take it on.

Thanks,

SIDL

[thefibreshop]

It's the same error message as the OP. I have the most up-to-date Square.

[Valentina]

Got it, @thefibreshop 👍 

Have you reached out to our team and provided them with the info I mentioned using the link above since last evening?

[woolworkshop]

I have the same issue. I want to be able to reuse gift cards but they don't unlink from previous customers' information when the balance reaches $0. As a result, it has happened multiple times that the receipt automatically gets sent to the wrong customer. I have tried to manually reset the cards, but I get the same error message "Clear Balance failed. Invalid Card. Please try a different card." because the card balance is already $0.

[Valentina]

Are you able to clarify what error message you are seeing @woolworkshop?

Is your Point of Sale app up to date as well?

If you get in touch with us directly and provide us with the customer name and the last 4, we can see if we can clear it for you.
The card will unlink when cleared - please get in touch so we can get take a look with you!

P.S. Welcome to the Seller Community ✨

[thefibreshop]

Why do we need to spend time out of our day to call to get each individual card cleared instead of your tech support fixing the system so we don't get the error message? It gives us the option to clear cards to be able to reuse them, but then DOESN'T clear the cards so we can reuse them. It's not one individual card. Tech support needs to fix the programming.

[thefibreshop]

I have an ever-increasing stack of used gift cards that I'm unable to clear and reuse. Has this issue been looked into at all? Every time I try to reset a $0 gift card it gives me the error "Clear Balance Failed, Invalid card. Please try a different card."

[JJ_]

Hey there @thefibreshop

Sorry to hear about this experience. We recommend checking to make sure that both your app and your mobile device itself are up-to-date. If everything looks good there, you'll want to reach out to have this escalated if necessary.

If you haven't already, your best bet is to get in touch with us directly, so that a member of our Support team can dig in with you. When you have a moment, please reach out directly by logging into your Square account and heading here.

[thefibreshop]

Are you making every individual business who is having this issue (which seems to be many of us) contact you to get this fixed instead of just coming up with a fix that you can roll out? All of my apps are updated. This is an issue on Square's end that seems to not have been addressed at all since we've been posting about it.

[JJ_]

I understand your frustration, believe me, I do. I will go ahead and escalate your case over to our support team so they can work on your particular case. Keep in mind that they may follow up with you via email to confirm if they need you to call in to correct the inconvenience. 

The reason behind this is we do work on your account to confirm what is causing the error on your specific and unique set of Gift Cards @thefibreshop. 

I hope this information is helpful!

[LSBS]

I’m just checking in on this thread to see if there’s any update on a resolution to clearing the linked profiles on the gift cards? From the way this thread ended it doesn’t seem like there was but it was last year so I’m wondering now if there’s been any improvements made. I’m getting same results as primary concern of this topic.