Gift vouchers sound quite simple. Someone pays you £65, you give them a voucher for £65, and eventually somebody comes in and uses it.

But once you’re selling them in a few different ways, it can get messy quite quickly.

I sell gift vouchers through my website, but that’s not the only way people buy them from me. Some people message me directly, send a bank transfer and I email or post the voucher to them. Others buy one when they come in for their massage.

So I might have vouchers coming through different payment methods and in different formats, but I still need to know exactly what is outstanding.

Who bought it? Who is it for? How much is left on it? When does it expire? Has it already been used?

This is how I manage mine.

I sell a value, not a treatment

My gift vouchers are sold as a monetary value rather than something like:

“One 60-minute massage”

There are a couple of reasons I prefer doing it this way.

My prices can change.

If somebody buys a £65 voucher today and my prices increase before the recipient uses it, the voucher is still worth £65. They can put that £65 towards whichever treatment they choose and simply pay the difference.

It also means I’m not promising to provide a particular treatment months into the future.

I’ve changed my treatment menu quite a lot over the years. There are treatments I used to offer that aren’t available anymore. I don’t want a voucher sold today to obligate me to provide exactly the same service six months later if I’ve decided that treatment no longer belongs in my business.

A value voucher avoids that problem.

£100 is still £100.

The person receiving it can look at my current treatment menu when they’re ready to book and decide how they want to use it.

It also makes the voucher much easier to give as a present. The person buying it doesn’t necessarily need to know whether their friend wants a 60-minute massage, a longer treatment or something else.

What happens if the treatment costs more than the voucher?

They pay the difference.

For example, if somebody has a £65 voucher and chooses a treatment that is £90, £65 comes from the voucher and they pay the remaining £25.

I don’t change the value of the voucher because my prices have changed.

This is another reason I prefer putting the monetary value on the voucher rather than promising a specific treatment.

And if they don’t spend all of it?

I keep the remaining balance available until the original expiry date.

So if someone has a £100 voucher and uses £90, they still have £10 left.

That £10 doesn’t disappear just because they’ve used the voucher once.

This is also something you need to be able to track. A voucher being presented doesn’t necessarily mean that voucher now has a £0 balance.

I use a six-month expiry date

My gift vouchers are valid for six months from purchase.

That’s the validity period I’ve chosen for my business, and my gift voucher terms are included in the terms and conditions on my website.

There isn’t a general UK law that simply says gift vouchers have to last six months, 12 months or another fixed period. If you’re setting your own expiry period, make sure your conditions are clearly communicated rather than assuming there is a standard period every business uses. Northern Ireland Assembly

Personally, I’m also not standing there waiting for midnight on the expiry date so I can refuse someone’s present.

If the voucher expires today and the client contacts me today to use it, I’m going to accept it.

Someone bought that voucher for them. They spent their money with my business because they wanted to give somebody a massage as a present. I keep that in mind when I’m dealing with expiry dates.

I also privately allow another month as a grace period.

I don’t advertise that as part of the voucher validity. The voucher is valid for six months. The additional month is simply some discretion I give people because life happens.

After that grace period, I consider the voucher expired.

That gives me a boundary without having to be unnecessarily rigid with someone who has contacted me a few days late.

My vouchers are non-refundable, but they aren’t tied to one person

My gift vouchers are non-refundable, and this is covered by my terms and conditions.

But I don’t mind who ultimately uses one.

If somebody receives a massage voucher and decides they’d rather give it to their partner, mum or somebody else, that’s fine with me.

I’m interested in whether the voucher is valid and has an available balance, not whether the person standing in front of me has the same name originally written on it.

That is my own business policy, so if you sell vouchers yourself, decide what your rules are and put them into your terms rather than making the decision for the first time when somebody asks.

What if someone loses their voucher?

This is where keeping proper records becomes useful.

If somebody tells me they’ve lost their voucher but can give me their name or the name of the person who bought it, I can look through my records.

I’m a small business. I don’t have hundreds of active gift vouchers sitting on the system at the same time, so normally it’s possible to investigate.

But I would only honour a lost voucher without the original if I’m 100% sure I’ve identified the correct one.

Otherwise you could eventually have somebody else turn up with the original voucher and suddenly you’ve redeemed the same value twice.

The difficult part isn’t selling them. It’s tracking them.

This became the main issue for me.

I don’t have one single route through which every voucher is purchased.

Someone might:

• buy through my website
• contact me and pay by bank transfer
• ask me to email the voucher
• ask me to post a physical voucher
• buy one while they’re already at the clinic

From the customer’s point of view, that’s convenient.

From my side, it means the information can end up in several different places.

That’s why I keep one central record regardless of how the voucher was originally purchased.

For each voucher I record:

Voucher number
Purchaser
Recipient
Value
Purchase date
Expiry date
Redeemed date

And I need to know its current status and any outstanding value.

If someone contacts me six months later and says, “My friend bought me a voucher but I’ve lost the email,” I don’t want to be searching through bank transfers, emails, website orders and old messages trying to work out whether £90 came from them.

I want one place I can check.

Don’t forget that unused vouchers are still sitting in the background

This is another reason I think therapists should keep track of vouchers properly.

Imagine you’ve sold:

• five £65 vouchers
• three £90 vouchers
• two £120 vouchers

That’s £835 worth of massage that people may still come back to claim.

The money arriving in your bank account can make gift voucher sales feel finished. Operationally, they aren’t.

You still have an obligation attached to those vouchers until they’re redeemed or expire according to your terms.

Decide your rules before you start selling them

You don’t need complicated systems to sell a few massage gift vouchers.

But I would decide a few things before putting a Buy Gift Voucher button on your website:

What exactly are you selling, a monetary value or a specific treatment?

How long is it valid?

What happens if your prices increase?

Can the recipient use it as part-payment?

What happens to any remaining balance?

Can somebody else use it?

Is it refundable?

What happens if it’s lost?

And most importantly, where are you going to record all of this?

The system doesn’t need to be sophisticated. It just needs to mean that six months later, when somebody walks in with a voucher you’ve almost forgotten about, you know exactly what you’re looking at.

Free Gift Voucher Tracker

Because I sell vouchers in several different ways, I made a simple Excel tracker so I could keep them all together rather than checking different systems.

It records the voucher number, purchaser, recipient, value, purchase and expiry dates, redemption and outstanding value. It also automatically shows whether a voucher is Active, Expiring Soon, Expired or Redeemed.

I’ve made the same tracker available as a free download for other therapists who want a simple way of keeping on top of their vouchers.