Native Gift card tracking and sales

Enhancement Voting Large New Roadmap Sized Items
1

Name of Feature/Request: Native Gift Card Sales, Tracking, and Redemption Module with Unique Card Number Control

What financial, time savings, or quality of life improvements will occur with this:

Implementing a true gift card module would significantly reduce accounting errors, cashier mistakes, and reporting gaps while improving customer experience and internal controls.

Financial & operational improvements include:

  • Eliminates revenue leakage caused by lost or unrecorded gift card numbers

  • Prevents duplicate redemptions and fraud risk

  • Ensures proper liability tracking for outstanding gift card balances

  • Reduces accounting cleanup work caused by credit memo workarounds

  • Removes manual memo-field entry dependency (major human error point)

  • Enables clean liability reporting for unused gift cards

  • Improves audit trail and reconciliation accuracy

  • Reduces cashier training complexity

  • Speeds up checkout process

  • Provides management reporting on:

    • Gift cards sold

    • Gift cards redeemed

    • Outstanding balances

    • Breakage trends

  • Improves customer confidence and brand professionalism

Time savings:

  • Eliminates manual tracking spreadsheets
  • Eliminates post-sale accounting corrections
  • Eliminates manual gift card lookup processes
  • Reduces back-office reconciliation time

Quality of life improvements:

  • Cashiers cannot forget to record card numbers
  • Accounting does not need to reverse/repair transactions
  • Managers can instantly search gift card history
  • Clear workflow instead of workaround workflow

Attempted solutions so far:

We are currently forced to use credit memos and manual memo-field notes to simulate gift card sales and redemption. This creates multiple operational risks and inefficiencies:

  • Gift card numbers must be manually typed or scanned into memo fields

  • No required-field enforcement, numbers are sometimes forgotten

  • No structured gift card database exists

  • No automatic balance tracking

  • No redemption validation

  • No built-in liability reporting

  • No automated linkage between sale and redemption

  • Reporting is fragmented and unreliable

  • Requires manual cross-checking

  • High dependency on staff consistency

We have also attempted:

  • Spreadsheet tracking systems

  • Manual numbering logs

  • Memo note conventions

  • Training cashiers to manually record numbers

All of these approaches are fragile and error-prone.

Digging deep - Any additional Why behind this request / How was this accomplished before Striven:

Before Striven, our prior POS/accounting systems had native gift card functionality that included:

  • Unique card number generation or scan

  • Stored card balance tracking

  • Liability ledger tracking

  • Redemption validation at POS

  • Transaction linkage between sale and use

  • Reporting dashboards for outstanding balances

  • Required field controls

  • Fraud prevention safeguards

Gift cards are a standard retail and multi-location business requirement. Treating them as credit memos is not functionally equivalent and creates accounting distortion and operational risk.

Gift cards function as:

  • Stored value instruments

  • Deferred revenue liabilities

  • Customer acquisition tools

  • Marketing tools

  • Holiday sales drivers

Without a native feature, businesses must rely on workaround accounting entries instead of proper system controls.

This enhancement would bring Striven in line with standard retail ERP/POS capabilities and significantly improve operational integrity for any business that sells gift cards.