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A gift card is a fixed amount of money, sold up front and spent later: the studio voucher a client buys for a friend, or the balance you comp a client as goodwill. It is managed from Finance → Gift cards, alongside Payments, Invoices, Orders and the rest of Finance, not from the Services/Products/Plans catalogue itself: selling one does not add anything to your Offerings, it raises a purchase invoice on the spot.
A gift card is not the same thing as a Plan’s credits, even though both are a balance a client draws down. Keep them apart:If you want a client to prepay for ten specific massages, that’s a Plan. If you want to sell a voucher they (or someone they give it to) can put toward whatever they buy from you, that’s a gift card.

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Sell a gift card

1

Open Finance → Gift cards

Go to Finance and select the Gift cards tab, then New gift card.
2

Choose the purchaser

Pick the contact who is paying with Purchaser. This is who the purchase invoice goes to.
3

Add a recipient (optional)

Recipient decides who actually gets the code once the card activates. DMLY’s own hint: “Who receives the code. Leave empty to send it to the purchaser.” Set it when a client is buying a card as a gift for someone else.
4

Set the value and expiry

Enter the Value. Expires is optional: leave it blank and the card never lapses on its own; set a date and see When a gift card expires below. There’s no currency picker here: a gift card is always issued in your workspace’s default currency, from your business details.
5

Sell it

Select Sell. DMLY mints the card’s code, creates a purchase invoice with a single “Gift card” line for the value you set, and sends that invoice to the purchaser, on WhatsApp by default. The tip page never appears on a gift-card purchase.
The card is created Pending. It has a code already, but it isn’t spendable yet: the whole point of a gift card is that it only turns real once someone has actually paid for it.

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Issuing a card for free

Toggle Issue as a comp instead of filling in a purchaser, and DMLY skips the sale entirely: no purchase invoice, and the card is Active the moment you save it, with the code delivered to the recipient right away. Use this for a goodwill gesture or a promotional giveaway rather than a sale.

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Activation

A card goes from Pending to Active the moment its purchase invoice is paid, however that happens: the purchaser pays the online link, or you record cash or a bank transfer yourself. The instant it activates, DMLY delivers the code by WhatsApp and email to the recipient (or the purchaser, if no recipient was set), using a message built from the dmly_gift_card WhatsApp template: the recipient’s name, the value, the code, and your business name.
This delivery isn’t the one you toggle in Notification settings. “Gift card delivery” does appear as a card under Workspace Settings → Notification settings → Finance notifications, but switching it off there has no effect; the code still goes out over WhatsApp and email every time a card activates. Don’t rely on that toggle to silence it.
As with any DMLY WhatsApp notification, delivery needs the dmly_gift_card template approved by Meta. If a recipient says they never got their code, check the template’s status under Message templates before anything else. The invoice itself still shows the code as its line-item description even while unapproved, so you can always read it out or forward it yourself.

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The code, and the card’s status

A code looks like GC-XXXX-XXXX, a fixed prefix plus two random blocks, unique per workspace. You’ll see it on the card in the Gift cards list, on the purchase invoice line, and in the delivery message. Select View on any card to open its detail drawer: balance, purchaser, recipient, expiry, and its full redemption history.

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Redeeming a gift card

There’s no self-checkout field where a client types their own code; a gift card is redeemed by a staff member, the same way you’d record a cash payment or a bank transfer.
1

Open the invoice it's paying for

The client can redeem a gift card against any invoice: a service, a product order, a plan, anything you’ve billed them. Open that invoice and select Record payment.
2

Choose Gift card as the method

Gift card only appears as a payment method when you’re recording against an invoice; it settles that invoice’s balance, so it makes no sense as a free-standing payment.
3

Enter the code

Type the code the client gives you (they’ll typically have it from the delivery message, over WhatsApp most often). The amount pre-fills to the invoice’s outstanding balance; leave it as-is to draw everything the card can cover, or reduce it to make a partial redemption and save the rest of the balance for later.
4

Redeem

DMLY draws whichever is smaller: what you asked for, the card’s remaining balance, and what’s actually still due on the invoice. If the card can’t cover the whole invoice, the balance still owed stays open for another payment method.
A card can be redeemed across as many separate invoices as it takes to spend it down; there’s no one-redemption limit. Each draw is recorded, and once the balance hits zero the card moves to Used up.
The card’s currency must match the invoice’s exactly. DMLY does not convert between currencies, so a card sold in one currency cannot be redeemed against an invoice in another; the redemption is rejected outright rather than converted at some rate.

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Cancelling a card

Select Cancel gift card on a Pending or Active card to void it. DMLY says exactly what it does: “Cancel gift card <code>? Any remaining balance is voided.” There is no undo, and no cash comes back to anyone through this action. If the card was still Pending (its purchase invoice unpaid), cancelling also voids that invoice, so the purchaser can’t pay it later and accidentally bring the card back to life.

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Refunds, and how gift cards appear in your revenue

Gift cards touch your books at two different moments, and DMLY is careful to count the money only once.
  • Selling the card is the real income. The moment the purchase invoice is paid, that amount is collected revenue, exactly like paying for anything else.
  • Redeeming it is not a second sale. When a client spends the card against another invoice, DMLY settles that invoice’s balance, but the draw itself is left out of your revenue totals and out of that client’s lifetime-value figure. It has to be: the money was already counted once, when the card was sold, and counting it again at redemption would overstate what you actually took in.
That split also governs what a refund does:

Refund the purchase

Refunding the invoice someone paid to buy the card hands their money back, so DMLY takes the same amount off the card. A full refund cancels the card outright; a partial refund just shrinks its remaining balance while it stays active.

Refund a redemption

Not possible. A redemption never took new money in; there’s nothing to hand back. DMLY blocks a cash refund on a gift-card redemption outright.
There’s no built-in way to put value back on a card after a redemption. If you need to undo one (you voided the invoice it paid, or the client didn’t get what they redeemed it for), DMLY has no “re-credit the card” action. The practical workaround is to issue a fresh comp card for the amount owed.

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When a gift card expires

Set an Expires date and DMLY sweeps for it once a day: an Active card past that date moves to Expired, whatever balance was left on it. This isn’t the same claw-back logic as Plan credits, which only takes back what a client provably didn’t use; a gift card’s expiry is all or nothing. Leave Expires blank at sale and the card is good indefinitely.
The card is still Pending: its purchase invoice hasn’t been paid. Check the purchase invoice under Finance → Invoices and either collect payment on it or record it yourself; the card activates automatically once that lands.
Selling and redeeming are ordinary Finance actions, available to any Member. Cancelling is gated the same way as changing Finance settings, so a regular Member can’t do it: only an Admin, the workspace owner, or a custom role explicitly granted that permission. See Roles and permissions.
It only shows up when you’re recording a payment against an invoice. Recording a free-standing payment (not tied to one) never offers it, because a redemption has to settle something.

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Next

Plans and credits

The other kind of prepaid balance: sessions, not currency.

Invoices

Create the invoice a gift card gets redeemed against, and record payments on it.

Payments and gateways

Connect a gateway so a purchase invoice can be paid online.

Notifications

Where WhatsApp templates like the gift-card delivery message are approved and tracked.