Gift cards are here — and they never expire

Gift cards are live on Bookka, on every plan including Free. A customer buys one straight from your booking page — a preset amount or one they choose — it arrives in an inbox, and it gets redeemed either against a booking or at the counter.

That is the whole feature in a sentence. What follows is the part that took the time, because two of the decisions look like settings we removed and are actually the reason the feature is safe to use.

Why the terms aren’t yours to edit

The obvious way to build gift cards is to give each business a text box for its own terms and conditions. We deliberately didn’t. The terms on a Bookka gift card are fixed platform-wide and no business can change them.

That sounds high-handed until you look at what’s in them. Under section 29(1)(m) of the Australian Consumer Law, it is an offence to misrepresent a consumer’s rights — and a bare "this card is not refundable" can breach that on its own, because it isn’t true without qualification. The sentence that keeps the policy lawful is the one saying these terms don’t limit your rights under the ACL.

In a text box, that sentence is one backspace away from gone. Nothing would look broken. No error, no warning, nothing failing in an obvious way — just a business quietly carrying an ACCC problem it would never notice, on a page that looks like an ordinary settings field.

Why they never expire

The Treasury Laws Amendment (Gift Cards) Act 2018 requires gift cards supplied in Australia to stay redeemable for at least three years, and bans fees that eat away at the balance while the card sits unused.

We could have built a three-year timer and been compliant. Instead Bookka cards simply never expire. It’s safely inside the law, it removes the argument entirely, and it means nobody has to answer an email from a customer holding a card that died on a technicality.

There are no balance-eroding fees either, for the same reason: the simplest way to never get this wrong is to not build the mechanism at all.

The unglamorous half

Most of the work on gift cards wasn’t the card. It was the edges — the places where money can go somewhere it shouldn’t.

• A gift card can’t buy another gift card. Otherwise value can be laundered around the system indefinitely, and the reconciliation never closes.
• A balance doesn’t leak into your next order. Applying a card to a shop order and then abandoning it used to be able to carry the discount forward. It doesn’t now.
• The rate cap can’t be used against a business. Any per-business limit is a lever, and a lever that can be pulled by anyone can be used to grief the business it was meant to protect.
• Gift card sales don’t double-count as revenue. Selling a card isn’t earning the money — you earn it when the card is redeemed. Counting both would inflate every dashboard on the platform.

None of that is visible when it works, which is rather the point.

What you can do with them

1. 1Turn gift cards on from your dashboard — available on every plan, including Free.
2. 2Customers buy from your booking page in preset amounts or a custom one, and the card is delivered by email.
3. 3Issue one yourself from the dashboard and email it straight to the recipient — useful for making good on a bad appointment.
4. 4Redeem against a booking online, or at the counter through the POS.
5. 5Track what’s outstanding from the dashboard, split into active and inactive and searchable by code.

Gift cards tend to matter most in the weeks before Christmas, Mother’s Day and Father’s Day, when a good chunk of your customers are buying for someone else. They also bring in money now against work you do later, and the person redeeming the card is frequently someone who has never been to you before.

If you’re setting up, the quick start guide covers getting your page live first. Everything we ship is listed on the changelog.