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.
5

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,