Reports and year-end reconciliation
Unspent gift card value is money your store owes customers. This article shows where to find the numbers, and how to check them against your books at the end of a month or year.
This is an operational report, not accounting advice. How you record gift card sales, tax and unused value depends on your country and your accountant.
The numbers that matter
| Term | Meaning |
|---|---|
| Issued face value | Value put on cards when they were issued. |
| Gift funds spent | Value customers spent at checkout. |
| Restored original tender | Value returned to cards when an order paid by gift card was refunded. |
| Gift purchase reversals | Value removed when a gift card purchase was refunded. |
| Audited adjustments | Manual corrections staff made, each with a reason. |
| Unspent value | What's left on all cards. Opening unspent value plus all of the above equals closing unspent value. |
| Reserved | Value held for orders that aren't finished yet. It's still part of unspent value. |
| Frozen / Expired unspent | Value on suspended or expired cards. It's still owed until you decide otherwise. It's never written off automatically. |
In the free plugin
Overview totals
Artbees → Gift Cards → Overview shows Cards issued, Issued value and Posted unspent value for the whole store.
Full-history CSV export
- Go to WooCommerce → Gift Cards.
- To export only some cards, filter the list first by Availability, Issued from / to, or the search box. The export keeps the filter.
- Click Export full history.
The CSV has one row per balance movement, with no row limit. Columns: Card ID, Masked code, Currency, Issued date, Transaction date, Kind, Signed amount, Balance after, Order ID, Actor, Reason and Reference. Codes are always masked. Cells are protected so a spreadsheet won't run anything typed into a message or reason as a formula.
Issued from / to filters cards by the date they were issued, not by transaction date. For a year-end review, export the full history and filter on Transaction date in your spreadsheet.
Dates in the CSV are in UTC, in ISO 8601 format such as 2026-12-31T23:59:59+00:00. If your financial year ends at midnight in your store's timezone, move the cutoff to match. The Kind column holds the short movement names issue, debit, refund, purchase_refund and adjustment.
Check balances with WP-CLI
wp gift-cards reconcile checks every card's balance and holds against its transaction history. It reports any difference and never changes data.
In Pro: the Reports view
Go to WooCommerce → Gift Cards → Reports.
- Choose From and To dates. They use your store timezone, which is shown under the dates.
- Click Review period.
The rollforward lists, for the period:
- Opening unspent value
- Issued face value
- Gift funds spent
- Restored original tender
- Gift purchase reversals
- Audited adjustments
- Closing unspent value
Opening plus the signed movements always equals closing.
Current availability shows today's reserved for orders, frozen unspent value and expired unspent value. These describe the store now, not the selected period, and can overlap.
The Period transaction drill-down lists every movement in the period, page by page, with the card, value and source order.
The same report is available to authorized staff through the read-only REST API at /wp-json/artbees-gift-cards/v1/merchant/reports?from=YYYY-MM-DD&to=YYYY-MM-DD.
Gift cards in WooCommerce Analytics
- Selling a gift card is the sale of a stored-value product. The plugin keeps gift card face value out of WooCommerce Analytics merchandise figures.
- When a remainder is paid by Stripe or WooPayments, the linked payment order is left out of sales reports, so the sale isn't counted twice. Refunds of that payment alone are left out of Analytics too.
- WooCommerce's legacy reports and third-party accounting exports aren't adjusted by the plugin. Reconcile them against your own accounting policy.
Year-end checklist
- Settle open items. Clear Refunds needing review and look at cards with failed deliveries. Process bank-transfer remainders that are on hold.
- Run the period. With Pro, run Reports for the financial year. Without Pro, export the full history and add up Signed amount for transactions in the year. The total is the change in unspent value.
- Record the rollforward. Save opening unspent value, each movement and closing unspent value with your year-end papers. Keep the CSV export with them.
- Check the arithmetic. Opening plus movements must equal closing. Run
wp gift-cards reconcileand make sure it reports no difference. - Match your books. Compare closing unspent value with your gift card liability account. Look into any difference using the drill-down or CSV, by order.
- Note reserved, frozen and expired value. List them separately for your accountant. Expired value isn't income until your accounting policy says so. The plugin never writes it off.
- Compare sales. Match Issued face value with gift card sales in your payment records. Cash received and gift value issued can differ, for example because of tax or manual issuance.
- Keep the evidence. Gift card history can't be edited or deleted, so this year's numbers can always be reproduced later.