insufficient funds on gift card

[MakSalonSpa]

Gift Card questions: 

• Every time a gift card is presented for payment, do I need to check the balance to make sure there is enough $ on the card before swiping the gift card for full payment?
• Will Square tell me there are insufficient funds on the gift card if I swipe it? 
• How does the Split payment work when I get a gift cards with insufficient funds? Do you run the gift card first or do you run other payment type first? 

We've had some sales where gift card was chosen as payment and it paid for the full amount before we swiped the card when there was actually insufficient funds on the gift card. 

Thanks.

[Tom · Accepted solution]

👋Thanks for checking in here, @MakSalonSpa. I'm addressing your questions below:

• Every time a gift card is presented for payment, do I need to check the balance to make sure there is enough $ on the card before swiping the gift card for full payment?
  Nope—the payment will only process if the full amount is available on the card. If it's not successful for any reason, you'll get a message indicates additional funds are needed.
  
  
• Will Square tell me there are insufficient funds on the gift card if I swipe it? 
  Yes—if there isn't enough on the gift card, you'll be lead into a split tender transaction, using the remaining balance on the gift card, which will then prompt you to accept payment for the rest of the amount needed to complete the sale.
  
  
• How does the Split payment work when I get a gift cards with insufficient funds? Do you run the gift card first or do you run other payment type first?
  

  Sure thing—if there are insufficient funds on the gift card, you can follow these step-by-steps for completing a split tender payment: Process Split Tender Payments with Square. I would suggest starting with running the gift card.
  
  

As far as the payment you processed, that does sound a bit strange. Can you touch base with our Customer Success team on that? They'll be able to take a deeper dive into the specific transaction and provide more details.🧐

Hope this helps get you in the right direction. Please let me know if you have any other concerns.

[MakSalonSpa]

Thanks so much Tom. We will reach out. Appreciate the clarification. 

[Curiosity]

This is no longer working correctly. Now if a gift card only has say $10 on it and is ran for $20 it will just decline it. This is a newer issue just starting this week. Please advise on how to fix this as it is very VERY annoying as we use gift cards and store credit rapidly. We cannot be doing all these extra steps.

[Curiosity]

This is on the bigger self contained POS system, it is still working on my smaller one.

[_Violet]

Hi @Curiosity - I'm sorry to hear that this issue with your gift cards has brought you to the Seller Community.

I'm not sure exactly what you mean by, "the bigger self contained POS system" but it sounds like you're referring to the Square Register. If the gift card flow wasn't behaving this way for you before, it's possible this is something we can resolve by troubleshooting.

I recommend starting out by making sure you're Register is on the latest software version by following the instructions listed here. If your Register's software is already up to date, please follow the steps for performing a factory reset here. If this doesn't improve things, please reply to this thread to let me know. 

I'll keep an eye out for your reply! 👀