How do I set up gift cards?

Turn on gift card selling, set your amounts and expiry, pick your occasion designs, and choose who gets notified.

Gift cards are included on Pro and Complete (Pro holds up to 1,000 live cards at a time; Complete has no plan limit, fair usage), and are also available as the standalone Gift Cards product (£25/month, unlimited live cards, fair usage) on any plan — including Free. There's nothing to install — when you're ready to sell online, switch on Sell gift cards online in Settings → Gift cards (it's off until you do) and your public gift page opens straight away.

Setting up. While gift cards' setup steps are unfinished, the Gift cards page shows a Set up gift cards card at the top — the same steps as Your set-up, with a tick on each one done. Each Start or Open button takes you to that step on Your set-up, and the card goes away by itself once every step is done or marked Not for us. For your first sales: put your gift page link where customers already look — your website, your Instagram bio and a QR poster for the bar — and show your staff how the Scanner redeems a card.

Where everything lives

The Gift Cards page (/dashboard/gift-cards, under Grow in the sidebar) is home: your sold cards (the Sold cards tab), redemption, the KPIs (outstanding balance, sold this month, cards expiring soon), selling actions, the Designs tab and — for owners and admins — the Physical cards tab. The gift card settings have their own page: Settings → Gift cards (/dashboard/settings/gift-cards, in the Settings menu's Grow group). The gear at the top right of the Gift Cards page (Gift card settings) opens it, with ← Back to Gift cards at the top to bring you back.

Settings → Gift cards

Open it with the gear at the top right of the Gift Cards page, or from the Settings menu. The settings sit in blocks — Selling online, Amounts and expiry, Bonus promotion, Price discount and Emails — and tapping a block opens it. Each setting says what it's set to right now, under its name; a change waits for Save changes in the bar at the bottom of the page.

• Sell gift cards online — OFF by default. Turn it on to open your public gift page and checkout; turning it off later pauses new online sales, and cards already sold keep working either way.
• Accept gift cards at online checkout — OFF by default, and shown only where your venue has an online checkout (booking deposits or event tickets); its words name the ones you have. Turn it on and customers can pay those with a gift card on your public pages. If a gift-paid booking or ticket is later refunded, the card payment refunds first and the rest goes back onto the gift card.
• Accept gift cards for table orders, Accept gift cards for collection orders and Accept gift cards for delivery orders — three switches, one per Order & Pay channel, all OFF by default and deliberately separate from the switch above: customers paying an Order & Pay order can use a gift card only on the channels you've switched on, so you can accept cards at the table but not on delivery (say), or for bookings and tickets without accepting them on orders at all. If you've never touched the collection or delivery switches they follow the table one.
• Pass the ResoFlow fee to the buyer — OFF by default: any platform fee on an online gift card sale comes out of the card's price; switch it on and the buyer pays it on top. The gift card platform fee is currently £0, so this changes nothing today.
• Amounts and tiles — the one-tap amount tiles buyers see on your gift page (up to 6). The defaults are £25 / £50 / £75 / £100.
• Smallest amount and Largest amount — buyers can also enter their own amount between your minimum (default £5 — you can raise it, never lower) and maximum (default £500). If you need to sell higher-value cards, contact support — the ceiling can be raised for your venue (up to £10,000).
• Bonus promotion — an optional "buy £50, get £60" style offer: a fixed amount or a percentage of extra value (with an optional minimum spend), added on top of what the buyer pays. OFF by default. While it's on, your gift page advertises the offer and every qualifying online purchase is loaded with the extra value automatically; if a purchase is refunded, unspent bonus value is withdrawn rather than paid out. Turning it off keeps your numbers for next time. You can also give it a Start date and an End date (both optional) and it switches itself on and off — for example "10% extra until Christmas Eve". Dates work in your venue's own time and the end day is included: the offer runs to the end of that day, then disappears from your gift page and stops adding value, with no need to come back and turn it off. Its settings say plainly whether the offer is live now, scheduled to start, or ended. A card bought while the offer was on always keeps its bonus — an end date never changes cards already sold.
• Price discount — the other kind of offer: instead of adding extra value, it cuts the price buyers pay — for example "pay £45 for a £50 card". A fixed amount off or a percentage off (1–90%), with an optional minimum spend and the same optional start/end dates as the bonus promotion. OFF by default. While it's on, your gift page shows the offer, the buy button and payment summary show the discounted price plainly, and the card is still loaded with its full value. The discounted price a buyer pays never drops below 30p (the card-payment minimum). If a discounted purchase is refunded, the buyer gets back what they actually paid — never the full card value. Only one offer can run at a time: if the bonus promotion and the price discount are both switched on, their dates must not overlap — the page won't let you save an overlapping pair.
• Balance update emails — the "£X used, £Y left" email customers get after each redemption. ON by default; the switch lives in Settings → Customer notifications, in the Gift cards section (the Emails block here shows whether it's on and links there).
• Hold new online purchases before first use — an optional fraud protection (OFF by default): a card bought online can't be redeemed for the number of hours you set (up to a week), giving card payments time to settle. At-the-venue sales and activations are never held. A held card that you replace (or resend, which replaces it) passes the hold on: the new card stays held until the original purchase's hold ends.
• Schedule ahead limit — how many days ahead buyers can schedule a gift delivery. Default 90 days; you can set anything from 1 to 365 days. The gift page's date picker follows your limit, and the checkout enforces it.
• Gift cards last — how many months cards last from purchase (scheduled gifts: from delivery) (or from activation, for physical cards). Default 24 months; the minimum is 12 months (UK guidance encourages at least 24). Expiry runs to end-of-day in your venue's time, and each card gets one reminder email about 30 days before it expires. The reminder is ON by default — the Expiry reminder emails switch lives in Settings → Customer notifications, in the Gift cards section (beside Balance update emails). Card holders can't opt out themselves.

Plan your Christmas push

From 1 September to Christmas Eve, the Gift cards page shows a Plan your Christmas push card to anyone who can change the gift card settings. It gathers the three things that sell the most cards in December — each set up in its own place, and none of them going live on its own:

• A bonus offer — press Set it up and Settings → Gift cards opens with its Bonus promotion filled in for you: £10 extra on a card of £50 or more ("Buy £50, get £60"), from 1 November (or straight away, once November has started) to the end of Christmas Eve. It's only a draft until you press Save changes, so change any of it first if you like. If you already have a bonus promotion, the card shows where it stands and Open the offer takes you to it, untouched.
• An email to everyone opted in — Write the email opens a new campaign on the Gift cards design. While your bonus promotion is on (or set to start), it is already in the design's highlighted box — in the words your gift page uses, with its dates; with no promotion set up the box is left for you. Nothing is saved or sent until you do it.
• A screen and a counter card — Open Wall screens to put the Gift cards screen on a TV, and Open QR codes to print a QR code for the counter that opens your gift page. A venue without wall screens (Gift cards on its own includes none) sees just the counter card.

Occasion designs

The designs have their own page: on the Gift Cards page, the Designs tab shows how many you offer — press Open the designs (Gift cards › Designs). There are 13 occasion designs — Birthday, Christmas, Thank you, Just because, Dinner on us, Valentine's Day and more — each with a switch to offer it to buyers or not. Open a design to change its greeting, intro line, accent colour and photo, one step at a time, with live previews of the gift email and the Apple/Google Wallet pass; its Review lists every answer, Apply puts the change on the page, and Save changes at the bottom puts it live. On the wallet pass the balance is the large main line and your greeting sits on a normal line beneath it (a design with its own picture shows the picture there instead, with the balance beside your venue's name).

Seasonal designs only in their season (on by default): Christmas (1 November to 26 December), Valentine's Day, Mother's Day and Father's Day (each from four weeks before the day to the day itself) show to buyers only in their season — and first while they do; each of those rows says when buyers see it. Turn it off to offer them all year.

Beside the list on a wide screen (under it on a smaller one), Words on the wallet pass applies to every design: Your word for the balance (for example "Credit" — shown above the amount on the Apple Wallet pass, up to 20 characters; Google Wallet always says "Balance") and A note on the back of the pass (up to 200 characters — on the back of the Apple pass, and listed when a Google card is opened). Passes already saved to a phone pick up a new note the next time they update. No wallet lets a pass change its type size or typeface. The back of the pass also shows the buyer's own message, when they wrote one.

Emails and notifications

• The gift card email templates (gift delivery, receipt, balance update, expiry reminder) are venue-editable in Settings → Communications → Email templates (/dashboard/settings/email-templates) — the code, value and expiry blocks are fixed so a card can never go out without them. The gift email's heading, opening words and button follow each card's design unless you write your own Heading, Body text or Button label.
• Two bell notifications exist — one for online sales, one for at-the-venue sales — each can be switched on or off per user (sound is off by default).
• A monthly gift card summary email (sold / redeemed / outstanding for the month) can be turned on from the Reports page (in the sidebar under Money), with its own recipient list — or, if your plan doesn't include Analytics, at the foot of Settings → Gift cards. It's off by default. When a bonus promotion made the figures differ, the email shows "Cash taken" and "Loaded onto cards" side by side (otherwise a single sales value as before), and the scheduled PDF's gift-card section shows "Cash taken" the same way.
• Money surfaces always tell the cash story honestly: the Payments page counts what the buyer actually paid (a "buy £50, get £60" promotion shows £50, with the £60 loaded onto the card as a detail), the Gift Cards page's "Sold this month" tile notes "£X loaded onto cards" when a promotion ran, and the sold-cards CSV has an "Amount paid (£)" column (blank on cards sold before this existed) and a "Platform fee (£)" column (blank when none was charged).

The public page

Your gift page lives at your venue's /gift/... link and is linked from your venue page (and your booking page's footer, if you take bookings) while selling is on. The Your gift page block near the top of the Gift Cards page shows that exact address with a copy button and an Open button (and Your gift page in the page's … menu opens it in a new tab), so you can paste it into your social bios, email footer or website without hunting for it — and it points you at the QR codes page if you'd rather print it. The Your gift page button at the top of the page opens it in a new tab, to see it as customers do. Before you switch online selling on the block still shows the address, labelled as closed, so you know where the page will live. It follows your venue branding and your "hide from search engines" setting. Buyers choosing straight-away delivery tick an express-consent box at checkout (the legal cooling-off waiver for immediate digital delivery); scheduled deliveries ask for no tick and the buyer keeps their 14-day cancellation right until the card is delivered — see the selling guide.

A note on VAT

HMRC's test for a gift card (a face-value voucher) is what it can be spent on (VAT Notice 700/7, single purpose vouchers):

• Single-purpose — it can only be spent on one type of thing, all at one VAT rate, so the VAT due is known when it's sold. VAT is due when the card is sold. HMRC's own example is a cinema voucher that only buys film tickets.
• Multi-purpose — anything else, for example a card that can be spent on more than one type of thing or on items at different VAT rates (the same HMRC example becomes multi-purpose once it can also buy food). Nothing is due when it's sold; VAT is due when the card is spent, on what it's spent on, and nothing is due on value that expires unused.

Which of these your gift cards are depends on what they can buy at your venue, so check with your accountant — ResoFlow doesn't calculate or advise on VAT. Whatever they decide, ResoFlow's own reports treat a card the second way: gift card sales are left out of the Reports page's VAT summary card and the daily sales email, and the money is counted when a card is spent against an order or booking, through those lanes' own VAT rates. If your accountant says your cards are single-purpose, account for VAT on the sales yourself.

Outstanding balances are a real liability

Every unspent balance is money you owe your customers. The Gift Cards page shows the outstanding total at all times, sold cards keep working on any plan (even after a downgrade), and if you ever delete your ResoFlow account with balances outstanding, the deletion flow makes you download a final list of live cards and type an acknowledgement first — the cards don't stop being owed just because the software goes.

One legal line worth knowing

ResoFlow gift cards are deliberately single-venue, non-reloadable and never redeemable for cash — that keeps them inside the UK "limited network" exclusion from payment-services regulation. If your gift card sales ever exceed €1m (about £850k) in a 12-month period, you may have a duty to notify the FCA — one for your accountant or adviser if you're anywhere near that scale.

Related: How do I sell gift cards? · Physical gift cards · Redeeming gift cards at the venue