Gift certificates play a vital role in businesses for several reasons. They attract new customers, boost sales, and improve cash flow. These certificates serve as effective marketing tools, exposing your business to a wider audience while offering customers a convenient gifting option. By incorporating gift certificates, businesses can enhance customer engagement and loyalty.
In NetSuite, we have the Gift Certificates feature. This NetSuite functionality enables customers to buy store credit that can be sent as a gift to others. The recipient can utilize the gift certificate code when making a purchase on your online store or during a transaction with a sales representative. NetSuite provides flexibility in generating these codes; you can either manually create them or opt for an automatically generated random hash code by the system. It's important to note that gift certificate authentication codes remain inactive until the corresponding order used to acquire the gift certificate is invoiced, and you can also configure accounting preferences accordingly. To better understand how this works in NetSuite, see detailed discussion below.
To use the Gift Certificate item type, an administrator needs to enable the Gift Certificates feature. To enable the feature,
1) Navigate to Setup > Company > Enable Features
2) In the Items & Inventory subtab, check the Gift Certificates box
3) Click on Save
NetSuite employs authentication codes for gift certificates as a security measure. You can determine when these authentication codes become active by configuring your preferences. To set the Accounting Preference,
1) Navigate to Setup > Accounting > Accounting Preferences > Items/Transactions subtab
2) In the Items/Transactions subtab > Other Item Preferences section, look for Gift Certificate Auth Code Generation
3) Select from the Options
4) Click on Save
Please check SuiteAnswers ID 28223 - Setting Preferences for Gift Certificate Authentication Codes to be guided on choosing the best option for your business.
Creating and selling gift certificates in NetSuite are simple. The step-by-step guide on how to create a gift certificate is discussed in SuiteAnswers ID 102566 – Creating Gift Certificates, while Selling Gift Certificates is available in SuiteAnswers ID 28215- Selling Gift Certificates. Again, to activate the gift certificate, the order must be billed first.
Here is a sample of applying gift certificates to an invoice:
Sample Gift Certificate:
To apply the above gift certificate to a transaction,
1. Open an Invoice in Edit mode
2. Under Billing subtab > Payment subtab, we can see the Gift Certificate section
3. Enter the Gift Certificate code and Amount Applied. The remaining balance shows in the Available Credit column
4. Click on Add
5. Click on Save
Here is the sample transaction applied with the gift certificate:
Interested to know more about similar topics? Make sure to follow New to NetSuite > Supply Chain Management to be updated when new articles are posted!
