Void gift card selling transaction?

[daleadmin]

Here is an important question. Should you be able to void a transaction that sells gift cards? All gift cards will be sold as a separate transaction (you can sell up to 30 cards on one transaction) and you cannot sell anything else.

It seems to me that there are problems with being able to void this transaction. If you can, then the cards become worthless and if the customer has left the store then she will have no way of knowing this. This assumes that the employee doing the voiding was not suppossed to void them or voided them by accident. Since the void will not list the gift card serial numbers there would be no way to reactivate the cards.

To those of you who have run other POS systems with gift cards, did those systems allow you to void transactions that sold gift cards?

Dale

[lemon535]

surely there has to be a way to void them.

Make the option password protected and when you press F8 to void,
make a popup screen come up, something like

******************************
You are about to VOID a gift card

If you proceed with this you will
render the gift card #20013254445
useless.

Proceed?

1. YES 9. NO

*******************************

Also depending on their setup if they did accidently void the customers gift card and they had gone you could always ring up another one with the same gift card number. Would this work? or cant you re use the gift card number?

[dhUser]

You sholuld be able to void gift card sales. One idea is to keep a recovery file with each serial number and amount in the POS folder, offering a Recover Gift Card option.

dhuser

[daleadmin]

I am still leaning toward not voiding gift cards sales.

The best way to handle this is to just not screw up the selling of gift cards in the first place. How hard would that be? There are no discounts, reductions, taxes, or anything else allowed in a gift card sale. You ring them up and they pay for them, what problems could you run into?

As I have stated here before, I have run a keyshop for over 37 years. I and my employees have rung up over half a million sales in that time and we have still not rung up our first void.

Dale

[ChrisKraus]

Dale: Do you still have that contact person over at X-Charge / CAM Commerce Systems?
It might be nice to ask them how X-Charge handles something like this.

- Chris

[Bobby]

Hello Dale,

I vote for being able to void gift card sales. I have worked with 5+ different major retail pos systems and they all allow this. Yes, there is always a chance for theft and fraud. I think that if this gift card idea is to be implemented that it should be fully implemented. There should be tracking, i.e. a price inquiry lookup where the balance left on the card and the card's history is recorded. This is extremely usefully for customers if they loose there card. I have seen history lookups with dl (for check purchases) and credit card numbers (for debit and credit purchases). You could use customer info to lookup the history for dhpos purposes, since I know that saving cc info and dl info is not always secure. And yes, the world would be a happier place without voids, but they are a reality. Sometimes it is the cashier's fault, sometimes the customer's. A way to get around the void function, if you prefer, is to make them refundable. If there is a screw-up, you can always do a refund instead of a void. Also, that may please a customer who gets a gift card, as a gift, but does not want it. Just some ideas to help you out.

Thanks again for the great program. I am still looking forward to the customer info part being useful!!!

Later,
Bobby