Why aren't gift card sales appearing in my sales reports?

Retail & Point of Sale

Topic summary

Main issue: Gift card sales don’t appear in standard sales reports. Merchants using cash-basis accounting need to recognize revenue when the gift card is sold and want these amounts in daily sales/analytics.

Current Shopify behavior: Gift cards are recorded as liabilities (not revenue), so they’re excluded from sales reports and Home total. Amounts can be found in Analytics > Reports > Finances Summary under Liabilities > Gift card sales (requires a Shopify plan or higher).

Workarounds: Use the Finances Summary for totals. Or go to Sales reports > Sales by product, filter “sales item type” = gift_card, and enable the “Gift card gross sales” column to see amounts. Screenshots were provided to illustrate steps.

Merchant feedback: Access is cumbersome for daily workflows. Multiple users request an option to treat gift cards as revenue at point of sale and later offset by redemptions, including sales taxes and COGS (cost of goods sold). Some note EOD register summaries show gift card purchases, but backend daily analytics do not. One user observed canceled test cards showed as sales.

Actions/status: Support forwarded the request and store URL to developers; no commitment or ETA. Later posts (years on) report no change; the request remains unresolved.

Summarized with AI on December 14. AI used: gpt-5.
2

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”

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

  • Click on “Finances Summary”

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

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  • 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.

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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?