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 is unlimited), and are also available as the standalone Gift Cards product (£25/month, unlimited live cards) on any plan — including Free. There's nothing to install — when you're ready to sell online, turn on the online selling switch in Selling & settings (it's off until you do) and your public gift page opens straight away.

Your first 30 days. The Gift cards page shows a Getting gift cards earning card — a short checklist: Pick how the cards look · Set your amounts and expiry · Switch on selling online · Put the link where customers look · Show your staff how to redeem one · Your first sale. Ticks appear only for the steps ResoFlow can see for itself (amounts are set, online selling is on, a card has sold); the rest are reminders. The card hides itself once every checkable step is done, and the ✕ (Hide this checklist) hides it for you alone — it stays for anyone else who signs in.

Where everything lives

The Gift Cards page (/dashboard/gift-cards, under Grow in the sidebar) is home: your sold cards, redemption, the KPIs (outstanding balance, sold this month, cards expiring soon), selling actions and the Selling & settings tab.

Selling & settings

On the Gift Cards page → Selling & settings:

• Online selling switch — 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. Turn it on and customers can pay booking deposits and event tickets 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.
• Quick-pick amounts — the tiles buyers see on your gift page (up to 6). The defaults are £25 / £50 / £75 / £100.
• Custom amount range — 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. The card shows 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 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 Selling & settings tab 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 (days) — how far in the future 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.
• Expiry — how long 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.

Occasion designs

The Designs tab on the Gift Cards page has 10 occasion designs — Birthday, Christmas, Thank you and more. You can switch each design on or off, tweak its greeting, intro and accent colour, and add your own image, with a live preview of both the gift email and the Apple/Google Wallet pass. 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).

Under the list, 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.

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.
• 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. 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 shown on your booking page footer 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, 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. 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

Most monetary gift cards usable across your whole menu are treated as multi-purpose vouchers for UK VAT — VAT falls due when the card is redeemed, not when it's sold, and nothing is due on value that expires unused. A voucher for one specific standard-rated item can instead be single-purpose (VAT due at sale). ResoFlow doesn't calculate or advise on VAT — how you account for gift card sales is between you and your accountant, so do check with them. In line with that, gift card sales are left out of the Reports page's VAT summary card and the daily sales email; the money is counted when a card is spent against an order or booking, through those lanes' own VAT rates.

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