Gift cards

A gift card is stored money: someone pays you upfront, gets a unique code, and whoever holds that code can spend the balance towards any booking — in one visit or across several. Unlike a package (a prepaid bundle of specific sessions), a gift card is an amount, not a service, so there’s nothing to restrict: it works against any service, add-on, or balance due.

Gift cards are managed under Gift Cards in your admin portal, and are a Pro feature.

Turn gift cards on first

Gift cards are off until you switch them on, even on a plan that includes them. Go to Settings → Customer Journey, find Gift Cards under “Sold alongside”, turn it on and save.

While off, gift cards are hidden everywhere — no admin sidebar entry, nothing on your booking site, nothing in the customer portal.

Turning gift cards off later never takes away what customers already paid for. You stop selling new cards immediately, but every unspent balance stays spendable until it’s used up. Once nothing is outstanding, gift cards disappear entirely.

Selling gift cards

Online: customers buy from your booking site’s gift card page. They pick an amount (your presets or a custom amount), pay by card, and the code comes to them — or goes straight to the person they’re gifting, with a personal message. The buyer doesn’t need an account with you: gift cards are the one thing a non-customer routinely buys from a business.

How the gift reaches the recipient is up to the buyer. They can enter the recipient’s email, their mobile number, or both — whichever they fill in is where the code is sent, and only one is needed. Leave both blank and the code comes back to the buyer to pass on themselves. A texted gift names your business and includes opt-out instructions, and that number is used once for the gift and never contacted again.

In branch: open Gift Cards → Sell Gift Card. Take payment in person and the card is issued immediately, or send a payment link and the card activates when it’s paid. The receipt and the gift itself send automatically either way, by email and/or text depending on what you entered for the recipient.

Online sales need Stripe connected and online payments turned on. In-branch selling works regardless.

Where customers find them. Once gift cards are on, they appear in your booking site’s header, so a visitor can buy one without knowing the page exists — as a Gift cards button on its own, or grouped under Shop alongside packages if you sell both. Customers are also pointed to them where the intent already is: a Buy a gift card link on the packages page, and a prompt right after they finish a booking. Signed-in customers get My Gift Cards in their account menu, showing every balance and code they hold.

Spending a gift card

A gift card code is entered once, not every time. The recipient adds it to their account from My Gift Cards in the customer portal — that’s where the gift’s link sends them. From then on the remaining balance is offered automatically at checkout, so there’s no code to keep track of and nothing to lose if the email is deleted. Whatever isn’t spent stays on the card for next time, until it’s all used up.

They can also just enter the code at checkout without saving it first, which does the same thing and adds the card to their account at the same time.

The balance is always offered, never applied automatically — they tap Apply when they want to use it. That matters for someone deliberately saving a card for a bigger visit.

Saving a card to an account doesn’t lock it. Whoever holds the code can still spend it, exactly like a physical gift card — so a card added by mistake, or added by the buyer before gifting it, can still be passed on.

Nothing is deducted for bookings that are never confirmed: like every payment in JustBook, the gift card is only charged when the booking is actually placed.

At the front desk: when you mark an appointment as paid in person, enter the code in the payment window. It shows what the card covers and what stays on it, and drops the amount you actually collect — down to nothing if the card covers the whole balance. The card is a form of payment, not a discount, so tax is unaffected.

Your team can look any card up by code from the Gift Cards page to check its balance or history. A customer’s cards — bought or spent — also appear on their profile, and every gift card used on an appointment shows on that appointment’s payment breakdown.

Because a gift card is money you were already holding, an appointment paid entirely by card shows $0 collected — that’s correct, not a missing payment. The revenue was recognised when the card was spent, not collected again.

Tax

A gift card sale itself carries no tax — you’re holding the customer’s money, not selling a service yet. Tax applies normally when the card is spent on a booking, exactly as if the customer were paying by card.

Expiry

By default, gift cards never expire. You can set an expiry window (in days) under Settings → Customer Journey → Gift Cards; it applies to cards sold after the change — already-sold cards keep the terms they were bought under.

Before setting one, check the rules where you operate: many places regulate or ban gift card expiry, and the setting is your responsibility to use lawfully. When a card does expire, any remaining balance is forfeited; the holder gets a warning email a week before.

Cancellations, refunds and adjustments

• A booking paid with a gift card is cancelled: the amount goes back onto the card, never out as cash. That keeps a gifted balance a gift — it can’t be converted to money by booking and cancelling.
• Refunding a purchase: from the card’s detail page, Refund purchase returns the unspent balance to the buyer — back to their payment card for online sales, or recorded for you to hand back in person for front-desk sales. Money already spent on visits stays spent: a $50 card with $20 used refunds $30. A full refund closes the card. (Refunds issued from your Stripe dashboard show up on the card automatically too.)
• Cancelling a card: stops an unspent code being spendable without moving any money — use it for a card that should simply be voided. To give the buyer their money back, use Refund purchase instead.
• Adjustments: from the card’s detail page you can add to or deduct from a balance, with a reason that’s kept in the card’s history — useful for goodwill top-ups or correcting a mistake.

Every movement on a card — purchase, redemption, restoration, expiry, adjustment — is recorded in its history, so the balance is always explainable.

Where gift cards appear in your bookkeeping

Gift cards get their own lines on the Finance page, kept deliberately separate from your sales figures:

• Gift cards sold is money you’ve collected, but it is not revenue yet — it’s a balance you owe the customer until they spend it. It counts in “Total collected” (the cash is real) and never in gross or net sales, so your revenue and tax figures aren’t inflated. The revenue shows up later, inside the appointment the card pays for.
• Gift card liability is the total still sitting unspent on active cards right now — what you’d owe if everyone redeemed today. Accountants will ask for this number; it’s on the page and in the export.
• Breakage appears only if you use expiry: when a card expires with money left, that forfeited balance is recognised as income on the day it expires.
• Purchase refunds reduce the sold figure in the month they happen, and every line also appears in the transactions list and the Excel export.

One caveat: like packages, gift cards belong to the business rather than a branch, so they’re not shown when the Finance page is filtered to a single branch.