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.
6

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.

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