Gift Card Sales not included in reports

[Red_Stick_Spice]

Why aren't gift card sales showing up in our sales reports?

I assume the vast majority of your customers are small businesses that report cash based bookkeeping. We must report the gift card sale at the point of sale, not the point of use.

Please give us this option asap.

Since I must currently print two reports 1- sales 2- gift card sales to handle this oversight...how on earth do I accomplish #2?

maybe its right in front of my face...but I just spent 30 minutes trying to generate this report and for the life of me cant figure out how to do it.

Id call support, but that will take 8 hours of my day.

#frustratedinretail

[Tira]

Hi, @Red_Stick_Spice. 

Tira here, from Shopify. 

Thanks for reaching out, I appreciate that you tried to pull up a gift card sale report on your own and I’m here to help you with this.

Gift cards won’t show up in sales reports because they are liabilities. When a gift card is issued from your Shopify admin or sold on your store, it won’t be included as a sale in any report, nor will it be shown in the total sales number in the Home sidebar. 

The amount paid for a gift card will be included in your Finances Summary report under the Liabilities section for Gift Cards. 

To access this report, you must be on a Shopify plan or higher and you can follow these steps (I’ve also included some screenshots from my test store to show you what this looks like.):

- Login to your Shopify Admin

- Click on “Analytics”

- Click on “Reports” and scroll down until you see “Finances”

- Click on “Finances Summary”

-

- Click on the button on the far right to adjust the reports to the date you wish to view

- Under the “Liabilities” section on the left, you will see “Gift card sales” along with the total of gift card sales next to it. If you click on the text, you will open up this report and it will show the Gift card sales for that date.

You can check out our help doc with more information on how gift cards are recorded in your Finance reports when a gift card is issued, sold to a customer, and used by a customer, here: Gift card sales reports. 

Is this what you were looking to do?

[Red_Stick_Spice]

That report is not available and this is a huge problem. 

But first let’s address the larger problem. We are required by our tax rules to pay tax on the income which occurs at the point of sale as are, I suspect the vast majority of your small business customers.

Right now that data is hidden from me, this must be fixed

[Red_Stick_Spice]

report is available, just not easy to access. We really need an option to turn this into income. Most small retail shops use cash accounting, which require us to report this as income when sold.

[Tira]

I'm glad to hear that you are able to access the report, @Red_Stick_Spice.

I am not familiar with the term, "cash accounting". Do you have an example of this so that I can look into our resources for you and guide you to a solution? I am also happy to submit this as feedback to our developers so that we are aware of how we can improve Shopify for you and all of our merchants. I know that this time of year is a busy year for a lot of merchants, so I want to make sure we understand how we can help. 

Thank you and I look forward to hearing from you, 

[Red_Stick_Spice]

Tira,

But this is the problem...Shopify should know what this means. Its accounting 101 and I'm going to guess that well over 50% of your users use this form of accounting.

There are two basic forms of accounting ACCRUAL based and CASH based.

Cash based accounting means exactly what the term implies. Receive cash...report cash, sell a gift card, report that sale. The main difference is the timing of when revenue and expenses are recognized. Cash based accounting has an immediate recognition of revenue and expenses, while accrual based accounting is based on anticipated revenue and expenses. The vast majority of small retail shops use cash accounting.

[Tira]

Thank you so much for writing out your definition for me. This helps me and the community understand more of what you're looking to do here so that we're on the same page.

I also did some digging and found our encyclopedia article on Cash Basis Accounting, that you can find here: What is Cash Basis Accounting? 

I experimented with my store and was wondering if this would help. Have you tried to go into the Sales Reports > Sales by product to find the income of gift card sales on your store?

To do this, you can follow these steps:

- Login to your Shopify Admin

- Click on Analytics > Reports

- Under the "Sales" section, click on Sales by product

- Click on the date and choose the date that you wish to find your sales from

- Once you've chosen your date, save your date and click on "Manage Filters" 

- In the dropdown field, make sure "sales item type" is selected, along with the "is" field

- In the textbox, type "gift_card" and a pop-up will show saying, "Filter gift_card". Click on this to add it as a filter, then click on "Apply Filters" to apply the filter.

- You should see a report of the gift cards you've sold, under "Gift card gross sales". If you don't see this, click on "Edit columns" and scroll down to "Gift Cards" to select this:

How does this help?

[Red_Stick_Spice]

But why do I need to jump thru hoops for something we do on a daily basis? I should have the option to define how Gift cards are handled so they show up as a sale in my regular reports?

[Tira]

That's a great point, @Red_Stick_Spice. We definitely want to make this easier for you and I can see how this would be beneficial for your business. There are several merchants who have also voiced their feedback on having a gift cards reported in sales reports, so I would like to help you by adding your name to this list. 

Do you have a store URL that I can pass along to our developers? I can't guarantee that we'll move forward with this request, if we do we will reach out to you and all of our merchants, and announce this on our changelog or announcements page. 

Let me know and I'll make sure to pass your request along with any additional feedback you may have to our developer team. 

Thank you,

[Red_Stick_Spice]

redstickspice.com

[Tira]

Thank you for your store URL, @Red_Stick_Spice. I have forwarded your name, store and feedback to our developers.

If you have any more feedback to add, we're always open to hear more.

Thank you,

[SeedSkateshop]

Well what a surprise, still no change. Still an unnecessary amount of work to get to something simple that should be part of our daily reports. Please sort this out Shopify!!!

[HRNaoise]

Yes, please change this! When gift cards are purchased the sale shows in the end of day Register Summary receipt but not in the daily analytics in the backend, how does this make any sense? 

[sassygrace]

We cancelled 4 gift cards that we had been testing with and had the $ amount show up as sales that day.