Gift Vouchers/Deferred Income - Help Needed

Ok, So we’re fairly new to Quickfile. Trying to get my head around accounting for gift vouchers. Any advice gratefully received! Rundown of how you run yours would be great.

Can’t get my head round how to separate the amounts of vouchers off into another account and how to allow for the voucher being spent. Obviously we wouldn’t pay VAT on the actual voucher sale, that would be accounted for when the voucher is spent. But when do i class it as an incoming payment? Is the money received when the voucher is sold excluded from our “profits” until the voucher is spent, or is it classed as a profitable income when bought and excluded when spent?

Sorry for the rambling post. I’m having real problems even trying to explain this lol

Thanks in advance!

Sean

Hi Sean,

Perhaps this topic could help?

http://community.quickfile.co.uk/t/handling-gift-vouchers/8872

The way I’m handling it is to create a merchant account for gift vouchers. Then given a Z reading that tells me total sales (say) £1000 of which £30 is gift vouchers, I first enter an invoice in QuickFile for £1000 and log the cash and card payments according to the Z reading, which will add up to £1000.

Now I edit the invoice and add a second line for -30 (the voucher sales), making the invoice total £970. This leaves the invoice “overpaid” by £30, and I finally “refund” the overpayment from the gift voucher holding account (leaving it overdrawn).

The final result of this is that the cash and card takings reflect the £1000 you took in, the sales figures are £970 (excluding vouchers), and the gift voucher holding account appears on your balance sheet as a £30 liability that will be settled when the voucher is spent.

When someone spends a voucher that is then a simple part payment of the relevant invoice into the voucher holding account, which cancels the outstanding liability.

Cheers Ian! That sounds the kind of thing i was thinking of. Had a go at a few test runs of that. Took a while for it to sink in lol. Seems to work a treat tho! Many thanks! One small query, when you receive a voucher back how do you account for it on your Z report?

My epos lets me do part payments using different tender types for the same transaction, so if someone paid for a £15 sale with a £10 voucher and the rest cash it would be recorded as two part payments against the same sale, one “voucher” and the other “cash”.