Gift Certificates and Quickbooks

[compunerdy]

When I sell a $100 gift cert it comes through as a $100 sale..

When the customer uses the gift cert to buy a $100 part the order comes through as a $100 sale..

I do not see any way with the current setup to have this be corrected automatically since the gift cert is done as a line item when purchased but not when used. How is everyone else handling this? Should I just make it so all the gift cert end up going towards a expense instead of sales? I know that is a half assed way of doing it but I am looking for a quick and easy solution.

[calvis]

When you sell a gift certificate it should be a liability.

This is the way I do it:

Create an item for Gift Certificates. When sold, it would go to an unearned income (liability account). When redeemed, it would be a method of payment received and you'd record the sale and reduce the unearned income account.

If someone purchases a gift certification you would not charge tax in your nexus. Only when they redeem the gift certificate.

[compunerdy]

Which would all have to be done manually I take it.

So basically once a gift cert has been used I could just delete the sales reciept where it was purchased and it would have the same results in quickbooks..

[calvis]

I don't know if I would delete the sales receipt as you want to have some record of the sale. I would just set the payment method to gift certificate and at certain intervals (quarterly or yearly) do a search by payment method and them make the appropriate GL entries to reduce the liability account as needed.