How do I load a gift card without paying for it?

[shopkins]

Hi everyone!

I often get asked for donations from local charities. They ask for gift cards so that they can be placed into gift baskets for auction, etc. 

How do I give them a $20.00 gift card? The only way I see to do it is if I pay for a card in my POS app as a customer. That means I lose the processing fee, and it appears as income in bookkeeping, which means I then have to pay Federal, State, and local taxes on it. 

How can I just place $20 on a card without buying it? Is there any way? 

Thank you for all your help!

Sam

[DinaLRosenberg]

I have the square register so not sure if this is the same... what we do is we ring through the register and then there is an option for more payment types and then other payment type- in there we write a note- donation with the appropriate agency.

You should not be paying transaction fees or taxes on gift cards in this way (to my knowledge).. Alternatively, you can use paper gift cards for donations and just run the transaction analog,

[Candlestore]

@shopkins 

Sam, you could fill the card with Cash to avoid the Square processing Fees.  As with any other donation for book keeping you would need to document this in your Accounting Software.  You could Create an Order and enter the information there for Donations to XYZ.  This way at the end of the Year you have all the Donations together.  Since I am not an accountant, I do not know how this effects taxes or income since it shows as a Sale for the amount of the Gift Card.   Plus another feed here, was saying that Gift Cards Show up 2 times on Income, 1 time for the Sale of the Gift card then again when the Gift card is used.  I have not been able to verify this as I have sold very few gift cards through Square.

Wish there was a way to add a Note to an in-person Sale for situations like this.  note as Donation.  

When we do donations, we just write down the items, subtract them from inventory and mark it in QuickBooks as a Donation.  I have not thought of Giving Gift Cards as a Donation.  We do not use Square at all for our Donations.