Paying for bookings with gift certificates

---

Plan Availability: X Soho | ✓ Pro | ✓ Plus | ✓ Enterprise | ✓ Flex |
Locate: Customers > Customer Booking Page or Booking Widget
Prerequisites: 

• A plan that includes Gift Certificates.
• The Gift Certificates feature activated within your account (Manage > Integrations).
• Gift Certificates sold or issued.
• The Gift Certificates feature is available to both those using items (Inventory > Items), a key feature of our classic version of Checkfront, and those using products (Inventory > Products), a key feature of our newest version of Checkfront.

 

New to Checkfront - Products ✨ Products (Inventory > Products) is the successor feature to (Inventory > Items) and is available in our newest version of Checkfront. Not yet on our newest version and interested in upgrading? Please contact our Technical Support team for more information. Discover more product-related help articles here: Products (New).

 

New to Gift Certificates or need to activate Gift Certificates for your account? Be sure to start with the first article in this series: Introduction to gift certificates.

In this article, we look at the process of booking with a gift certificate, cancelling pre-booking holds, cancelling gift certificate purchases, and viewing gift certificate activity.

 

---

Using gift certificates to pay for a booking is very easy. The Customer selects the item/product for booking as normal and fills out their booking details.

 

When it comes time to pay, the payment screen defaults to Credit Card. There is an additional option at the top of the screen labelled Gift Certificate.  

 

Clicking on Pay by Gift Certificate opens a pop-up window into which the Customer can enter their Gift Certificate Number/Code. This is the number beneath the barcode on their gift certificate PDF.

The Customer enters the Gift Certificate Number, including the dashes, into the GCN Code field. Once the system recognizes the code, the gift certificate displays below the GCN Code field.

Clicking the Apply button deducts the invoice total from the gift certificate balance.

The Customer might then have a balance remaining, which can be used at a later date. If the gift certificate balance was not enough to cover the transaction, then the Customer can enter another gift certificate number, or make a payment via credit card.

 

The minimum gift certificate amount that can be applied for payment is 1.00.

 

---

 

A Pre-Booking is a booking initiated, but not yet completed by a Customer.

If the Customer has entered a gift certificate number as partial payment for that Pre-Booking, then the gift certificate, including any balance remaining on the card, is held until the booking is completed.

If the Customer backs out of the booking, then this hold remains on the gift certificate for a period of 30 minutes and the Customer is not able to use the card again until that time is up.

However, a Staff member can pull up the gift certificate in the back-end and manually remove the hold by following these steps...

1. Select Gift Certificates from the Inventory menu.
2. Find the gift certificate on hold in the Issued list.
3. Click on the record to view the Edit Gift Certificate page.
4. Find the Remove Manually button.
5. Click to remove the hold! The hold is removed immediately.

The gift certificate on hold can also be accessed via the Account Activity log (Reports > Account Activity) by clicking on the associated Pre-Booking record and then the gift certificate number within the related Booking Invoice as shown in the screenshot above.

 

If a booking with a gift certificate purchase is set to the Cancelled status or has been voided, then the purchased gift certificate is also voided.

Should Staff or a Customer attempt to redeem a voided gift certificate, then it shows VOID across the preview window and they are prevented from doing so.

 

---

Gift certificate activity can be viewed via the Gift Certificates page (Inventory > Gift Certificates).  Simply select All Gift Certificates or choose a particular gift certificate from the left-hand menu to view the list of Issued Gift Certificates.

Choose which information you need to display within the Columns modal. Optionally, you can Export the list of Issued Gift Certificates.

 

 

---

< Issuing gift certificates Staff-side by email    |     Configuring general gift certificate settings >

---