Balances, expiry and unspent credit

Every gift card you've ever sold and not seen spent is money you're holding for somebody else. Most salons never look at that number. It's usually bigger than they'd guess.

Finding a card

Marketing → Gift cards lists all of them, searchable by number or by recipient, sortable, and filterable by status.

Open one and you get its whole life: what it was issued for, what it sold for, every transaction against it, and what's left.

Four statuses, and they mean exactly what they say:

• Active — has a balance and can be spent.
• Empty — spent down to zero. Kept, not deleted.
• Expired — the date passed with money still on it. Canadian salons never see this one: cards there carry no dates and stay spendable until they're empty.
• Invalidated — voided here, deliberately.

Correcting one

Balances can be adjusted, and every adjustment records a Reason.

That's the mechanism for the real situations: a card issued for the wrong amount, a redemption taken twice, a goodwill top-up after something went wrong. The reason is not paperwork — it's the sentence that makes the entry comprehensible to whoever finds it next quarter.

Voiding a card invalidates it outright. That's for a card known to be compromised or issued in error, not for tidying up.

The money you're holding

Outstanding gift-card balances are a liability. The money is in your account and the obligation is still open, and the two don't cancel out until the credit is spent.

RewireBox tracks that total for you, along with the cards that have gone quiet — sold long ago, never touched. Dormant cards are worth a glance for two different reasons: they're a marketing list of people holding your money who've forgotten, and they're the bulk of what will eventually expire.

Breakage

Some credit is never spent. The card is lost, the recipient moves, the birthday passes. When a card expires with a balance on it, that money stops being something you owe — and that's called breakage.

RewireBox recognises it automatically: a daily sweep expires cards whose date has passed and records the balance that just stopped being a liability. Nobody has to remember to do it, and it doesn't happen twice to the same card.

None of this applies in Canada. Essentially every province prohibits expiry dates on gift cards, so for Canadian salons RewireBox won't accept a date on a card in the first place, the sweep leaves them alone, and the money stays a liability until it's spent. A card sold in 2022 is as good in 2032 — that's the law working as intended, not a card the system forgot.