Gift Certificates Overview

A gift certificate is a customer card allowing them to buy food or drink up to a certain dollar amount. What the rules of usage are will be up to your restaurant operation. Compeat provides a way to track the issuance and use of gift certificates, and to integrate them into your financial system.

To set up the use of gift certificates, you should select the checkbox "Use Gift Certificates" on the Other Accounts tab of the DSR Definitions screen, and enter account numbers in the GC Inventory, GC Liability, and GC Over/Short boxes of the same screen. Also, you will need to check boxes for all menu choices under Transactions > Gift Certificates in the Screen Access tab of the Security > Groups > Group Properties screen. This will enable you to access all the gift certificate functionality.

Each gift certificate goes through three states:

Note: When you Issue Comp Gift Certificates, they are issued from that screen, not the DSR screen. When comp gift certificates are posted, a debit will be made to the GL account of the comp code selected, as well as a credit made to the GC Inventory account. Redemption of comp gift certificates is handled on the DSR like any other gift certificate.

After Creation, Before Issuance

Two other states can occur after the certificate has been created but before it has been issued or redeemed:

Finally, you can perform two actions to gift certificates that have been created but not yet issued:

Reports

You can view the following reports about gift certificates on the Reports menu > Gift Certificates submenu: