The easiest way to accurately record the sale and use of a gift certificate is to add a cash payment to the customer who the gift certificate is for, and add a memo to the payment indicating that it is a gift certificate. Then as the customer orders product from you, they will slowly reduce their gift certificate balance until they are at $0 or owe you a difference. If you follow this approach, you will not record a separate sale for the gift certificate (if you did you would inadvertently duplicate your sales total).

The more complicated, but also more accurate, approach to recording gift certificates would be to create a custom product that represents the gift certificate being sold. You would then create an invoice for the sale of the gift certificate. When the gift certificate was used, you would need to add it as a discount to the invoice (not a payment, again to avoid total sales duplication). This approach is more accurate, as you are recording the money coming in for the gift certificate when it is sold, rather than as the customer uses it. Assuming most people will use their gift certificate within at least two years of receiving it, the first approach would be good enough for most reporting purposes.

For this approach, you would want to create a product to the following spec (or similar):

Number = GIFTCERT
Name = Gift Certificate
Price = $0 (This allows you to set the value in the invoice.)
Section = 2
Taxable = No

When adding this product to your invoice, you will need to make sure you mark it as a Sale and not a Gift, which is the default for all section 2 items added to an invoice.

To give you a quick example of how this would work, let’s say we have two customers Mary and Kate. Mary purchases the $125 gift certificate for Kate for $100. Kate then uses the gift certificate. Here are the steps to reproduce this scenario in Strive.

  1. Create an invoice for Mary and add the GIFTCERT product to it.
  2. Switch the type to Sale from Gift and set the price of the gift certificate to $100. Follow your typical invoice checkout and payment steps.
  3. Create a new invoice for Kate and add whatever product is purchased.
  4. Set the invoice’s discount field to $125 (even if this is more than the product purchased, if it is her balance after checkout will show as a credit).
  5. Follow the typical checkout and payment steps.


This second approach is more accurate in your scenario, because you will record the sale of $100 for the gift certificate, and the discount of products given away as $125 which correctly accounts for the difference in gift certificate purchase price and value.

If your customer is using each of the $25 for herself, you would follow the steps above and set her (prepaid) amount accordingly.

We apologize for the complexity, but these approaches ensure that the transactions are reported correctly come tax time.