The Gift of Gift Cards in Dynamics 365
The modern gift card, a wad of cash conveniently disguised in a rectangular piece of plastic. They are welcomed by birthday present recipients world-wide in place of an ill-fitting sweater. Of course, they do quite often end up living out their days in a kitchen junk drawer or stuffed in a wallet or purse, never to be heard from again. Regardless, they are an important aspect of our retail society, they must be issued, and D365 is up to the challenge! In this blog, we will explore retail gift cards in D365.
The first thing that is needed is a Gift card product. Open Module>Product information management>Products and search for Gift in the search bar. Here is a bonus navigation tip, notice that the drop down in the search allows for multiple field search options. When creating this product, note that is should be a service product. As for the physical cards, one could ping the big wigs at Microsoft and ask, but they will not provide them. That is up to the company to sort out.
If the gift cards are using a bar code, then it will be necessary to make sure a bar code exists or can be set-up in the system prior to finishing the gift card.
Next, there are parameters that need to set before starting. Navigate to Module>Retail and commerce>Headquarters setup>Parameters>Commerce parameters or search Commerce parameters. Click on the Posting menu item in the left navigation pane. On the Gift card fast tab there are some key fields to consider:
- Gift card product – In the Gift card product field, select the product discussed earlier.
- Gift card company – The value here should be the legal entity that is responsible for the liability of the gift card. Note that gift cards can be used across legal entities and at all stores. This also includes cross company transfer of balances between legal entities.
- Journals – The values will be used during posting.
- Add a new line for
- Start/End date – If the end date is blank the gift card template here will not expire
- Gift card number – This template will be used when generating the gift cards. This field is free text and should be discussed prior to creating a value to determine a strategy on naming convention.
Once the gift card is set-up, the stores or retail channels, must be configured to accept gift cards as a payment method. To check this setup, or configure it, go to Module>Retail and commerce>Channels>Stores>All stores. Click on the Set-up tab and the Payment methods button in the Set-up group. This will open the form to allow a user to add an existing payment method to the store. If the gift card payment method is not present, then they must be set-up separately before it can be added to a store.
If the gift card option is new to the organization, the POS layout can be setup to display and allow the gift card to be used. To read more about screen layouts. Click here for access to the Microsoft document on POS screen layouts.
Once created, the Point of sale (POS) system in D365 can perform a variety of actions with Gift cards: use them as payment, check balances, issue new gift cards, and add money to an existing gift card. D365 can also handle physical as well as electronic gift cards. This functionality appears in AX 2012 R3. Also, keep in mind that D365 can handle the processing of External Gift Cards, those issued by a third party. This does require additional set-up as well.
Hopefully, this blog post has provided some insight on how gift cards are handled in D365. This is a topic that also has AX 2012 relevance and more can be learned here about the AX 2012 navigation.
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