How can I charge a gift card without taking payment. (This is a donation.)

[Taylor1]

I often give gift cards as donations to silent auctions, competitions, etc. With Intuit I had an inventory item called "donation" that cost $-1.00, and would simply "sell" as many negative dollars as I wanted on the card, then charge the card, balance zero.

I can't figure out how to load a gift card on Square without actually having funds coming from somewhere.

Searched the FAQ to no avail. TIA

[Pappy]

Set up a discount for 100%. Label it Charitable Contribution.

[EJ_]

Hi @Taylor1

The post from @Pappy is a workaround I've seen a few sellers use. 

Discounts with a specific dollar amount with the name "Donation" or something along those lines helps with tracking these types of payments. 

You can also check out our new feature, Offer discounts and promo codes for eGift Cards

[rsklar]

I just use a custom discount for 100% donation which makes the charge -0- and in the notes I place a message as to what the donation was for, i.e., fundraiser donation to xyz event.  This way you are not looking for the money in your register.

Select Gift Card

Enter $ amount

Swipe Card

choose charge and enable 100% discount (Donation)

Add memo in memo field

save

Confirm Charge -0-

Done!

Also easy at the end of the year to run a report for all the discounts / donations you made.

[sfjeez]

I understand how to discount a card. When someone uses a card that has been given a 100% discount how does square show that in my sales. I obviously dont want that to show up as having taken in the money for accounting purposes.

[EJ_]

@sfjeez The sale will still appear in your Gross Sales numbers since these numbers reflect sales before any discounts or refunds, however, you can view your net sales and net total in the Sales Summary report for accurate numbers around these payments.

You also have your discounts report so you can correlate your numbers accurately.  

[BrakemansCoffee]

This reply was created from merging an existing thread: “comp button for donations?”. 

If we as a company want to donate giftcards can I use the comp button for it to be processed in our system? If not, is there another way?

[Chad]

Hello @BrakemansCoffee! This question has been asked a couple of times before, so I went ahead and merged your thread with this one. 

Check out the answers above! @rsklar has provided some awesome steps! 🙂

[Twistedhornmead]

What we do here is that we have created a Customer Profile for me (the owner) with my company debit or credit card on file.  I charge "myself" for the gift card and print a receipt for the transaction, and then our bookkeeper takes care of this on the back end for donations (we do a lot of donations!).  We do too many comps and discounts for other things.  It doesn't seem that the purchase of a gift card that has been discounted would actually load the card with the correct amount.  But this way creates a good paper trail for taxes at the end of the year.