💡 A guide for restaurant operators, finance teams, and support. Explains what the gift card reconciliation reports show and when to use them. No technical background needed.
Gift Card Reconciliation — Operator Guide
Why these reports exist
Gift cards work across every location in your group. A guest can buy a card at one restaurant and spend it at another, and that has always worked.
The money, though, stays where the card was sold. The location that sold the card is holding the cash. The location that served the food gave up food and drink and got nothing for it.
One or two of those a week is noise. Thousands a month is a real number, and every location's books are wrong until someone works it out. These reports work it out.
🔒 No money is moved by any of these reports. They tell you what to settle. You settle it however you already move money between your locations — your accountant, your bank, your franchise back office. NX never touches your funds.
A worked example
A guest buys a $100 gift card at Downtown. A month later they spend $60 of it at Riverside.
- Downtown collected $100 in real cash and still has it.
- Riverside served $60 of food and drink and collected nothing.
- So Downtown owes Riverside $60.
That is the entire idea. Everything below is that same calculation, run across every card and every location, then netted down so you make as few payments as possible.
Gift Card Liability & Net Position
Your group-level snapshot: how much gift card money is still owed to guests, which locations are holding cash that belongs elsewhere, and how old the unspent balances are. Most operators run this monthly, alongside the close.
Key columns
- Total Outstanding Liability — every dollar still sitting unspent on gift cards. This is money you owe your guests, not money you have earned.
- Value Sold This Period — gift card money collected across all locations.
- Value Redeemed This Period — gift card money spent across all locations.
- Cross-Venue Value to Settle — of that spending, how much happened somewhere other than where the card was sold. This is the only part that needs settling.
- Sold / Redeemed (per location) — what each location collected and what it honored.
- Own Cards — cards a location sold and redeemed itself. These wash out; no settlement needed.
- Owes Group — cash a location is holding for cards other locations honored.
- Owed by Group — money a location is due for serving guests on someone else's cards.
- Net Position — the two above, netted. The Direction column reads either Due to Group (you owe) or Due from Group (you are owed).
- Liability Aging — unspent balances grouped by how long they have sat untouched: 0–90 days, 91–365 days, and over a year.
When to use it
- Closing the month and needing one number for gift card liability on the balance sheet.
- Finding out which location is quietly sitting on the most cash that belongs elsewhere.
- Seeing how much of your outstanding balance is old enough to review for breakage.
- Sanity-checking exposure before a franchise or ownership conversation.
Gift Card Settlement Statement
The document you actually act on. It takes the period's cross-location activity and boils it down to the shortest possible list of payments that squares everyone up. Run it on whatever cadence you settle — weekly for a small group, monthly for most.
Key sections
- Period — the business dates covered.
- Settlement Model — either Venue-to-Venue Netting (locations pay each other directly) or Central Clearing Account (everyone settles with one central account).
- Settlement Basis — Face Value means a dollar redeemed is a dollar reimbursed. Rate means reimbursement is net of an agreed fee or royalty.
- Status — Ready to Publish when everything reconciles, or Draft when there are unresolved problems on the Exceptions report to clear first.
- Fund Behavior — always Report Only.
- Net Positions — per location: what it owes, what it is owed, and whether it Pays or Receives.
- Transfer Instructions — the actual list: who pays whom, how much.
- Contributing Cross-Venue Transactions — every individual card movement behind those numbers, so any figure traces back to a real guest transaction.
✅ Why the transfer list is short. With five locations owing each other in different directions you could end up making a dozen payments. The report nets everything down first, so five locations never need more than four payments — often just one or two.
When to use it
- Handing your bookkeeper a single page that says "make these three transfers."
- Settling up between franchise locations at month end.
- Answering a location manager who asks why they owe another store money — the detail section shows the exact cards and dates.
- Confirming a period reconciles cleanly before closing the books on it.
Cross-Venue Gift Card Redemption
Shows where gift card money sold at each location actually gets spent. Useful for understanding guest behavior across your group, not just for settling up.
How to read the matrix
Each row is the location that sold the card. Each column is the location that took it. Read across a row to see where that location's cards end up.
Where the row and column are the same location — the diagonal — that is cards sold and spent at the same place. No settlement needed.
Key columns
- Total Sold — all money redeemed on cards a location sold, wherever it was spent.
- Total Redeemed — all money a location honored, whoever sold the card.
- Redeemed Here / Redeemed Elsewhere — the split for each selling location.
- Retention — the share of a location's gift card sales spent back at that same location. Low retention means that location is effectively selling gift cards for its neighbors.
When to use it
- Seeing whether one location is a net seller of gift cards while another is a net spender.
- Deciding whether a location near an airport or mall should push gift card sales harder — its cards may be getting spent everywhere else.
- Explaining to a franchisee why their store keeps redeeming cards it never sold.
- Checking whether a new location is pulling guests from existing ones.
Gift Card Reconciliation Exceptions
Everything that does not add up. Review this before trusting a settlement statement — the statement stays in Draft until these are cleared.
| Exception | What it means | What to do |
|---|---|---|
| Orphaned Redemption | A card was redeemed but there is no record of it ever being sold. | Usually a sync gap or an outside-provider card. Check whether that terminal is syncing. |
| Negative Balance | A card is showing less than zero on it. | Investigate the card's history; usually a void or refund applied twice. |
| Sync Gap | Activity on record does not add up to the balance on record. | Something did not make it back from a terminal. Check that location's devices. |
| Provider Mismatch | For cards run through an outside gift card company, their balance and ours disagree. | Reconcile against the provider's own statement. |
| Stale Card | A card still has money on it but has not been touched in over a year. | Review for breakage or unclaimed property with your accountant. |
Anything flagged here is held out of the settlement totals until resolved, so a known problem never quietly inflates what one location owes another.
When to use it
- Working a short list before month-end close instead of discovering problems later.
- Catching a terminal that stopped syncing gift card activity.
- Building the list of aged cards your accountant needs for unclaimed property reporting.
- Investigating a location whose numbers look wrong on the settlement statement.
Gift Card Accounting Export
The journal-entry-ready version, for whoever keeps your books. Every table balances — debits equal credits — and account names can be remapped to your own chart of accounts.
Key sections
- Intercompany Journal Entries — per location, the entries that move the obligation from the guest to the sister location. A location that sold value someone else honored relieves its gift card liability and books a payable (Due to Affiliates); the location that served the guest books a receivable (Due from Affiliates).
- Account — the suggested account code. These are defaults, meant to be mapped to your own numbering during setup.
- Deferred Revenue Roll-Forward — how the gift card liability moved this period: what was sold (liability up), what was redeemed (liability down), and where it ended.
- Breakage & Escheatment Candidates — balances aged past a year, with the suggested entry to recognize them as breakage revenue.
⚖️ Breakage figures are candidates, not conclusions. Whether you can actually recognize aged balances as revenue depends on your state's unclaimed property rules and your own policy. NX reports the data; it does not file with states, and this is not accounting or legal advice. Confirm treatment with your accountant.
When to use it
- Handing month-end intercompany entries straight to your accountant or bookkeeper.
- Getting the deferred revenue number for the balance sheet without rebuilding it by hand.
- Preparing the aged-balance list your CPA asks for at year end.
- Reconciling gift card liability against your general ledger when the two have drifted.
Two things worth knowing
Positions always balance
Across the whole group, what every location owes and is owed nets to exactly zero. Money moves between locations; it is never created or destroyed. If your total is not zero, a location has been opted out of settlement, and the leftover is shown as an Unsettled Residual so it is visible rather than silently absorbed.
Cards loaded at more than one location
If a guest tops up the same card at a second location, both locations collected real cash. When that card is spent, the obligation is split between them in proportion to what each one collected.
For the ordinary case — a card sold once and spent later — this is simply "the location that sold it owes the location that took it."
Frequently asked
Does NX move our money?
No. These reports calculate and report positions only. Moving funds between locations is planned for a later release and would be optional; report-only remains the default.
Can a location be left out of settlement?
Yes. A location can be opted out — it still redeems cards from other locations as normal, but it is excluded from the settlement statement. Any imbalance it creates is reported as an Unsettled Residual rather than hidden.
What if we settle net of a franchise royalty?
Supported. Set the settlement basis to a rate instead of face value, and redemptions settle net of the agreed percentage. The statement shows the retained amount separately.
Do these work with third-party gift cards?
Partly. Cards issued on NX are fully reconcilable. Cards from an integrated outside provider are reconciled as far as the data allows, and anything that cannot be verified is flagged as a Provider Mismatch rather than quietly assumed correct. You can also scope settlement to NX-issued cards only.
Will re-running last month's statement change it?
No. Running the same period twice produces an identical result. Late-arriving transactions appear as dated corrections in a later period rather than silently changing a period you have already closed.