You had money sitting on paper and didn't know it
A beauty salon chain with three locations. They'd been selling gift cards for two years.
How many are still active?
"About a hundred."
How many expire this month?
"We'd have to check the spreadsheet… I'll get back to you tomorrow."
Who's redeeming them?
Silence.
This isn't a fraud problem. It's a more expensive, quieter problem: you don't know what you already have.
Every gift card you sell is money that came into the register. But until the customer redeems it, that money lives in an accounting limbo most small businesses don't manage. The spreadsheet sits in someone's inbox. The paper sits in a drawer. And the only person who knows the expiration date is whoever wrote it down.
When we went in to take a look, here's what we found:
- Gift cards sold more than a year ago that nobody was sure were still valid
- Customers who came in to redeem and couldn't because the location "couldn't find the record"
- Money the company had already received that was still being handed out as a loyalty bonus (paying twice)
And the most uncomfortable question of all: how many had already expired and were legitimate revenue that could have been recognized on the books?
Nobody knew.
What we built wasn't complicated. A single dashboard where every gift card shows up from the moment it's sold: number, amount, sale date, expiration date, status. Automatic alerts to the locations when one is 30 days from expiring. When it gets redeemed, it's marked and the books update on their own.
Results after two months:
Zero lost gift cards. What you sold, you track all the way to the end.
Four hours a week the office manager no longer spends reconciling spreadsheets with scraps of paper.
Real-time visibility into how much money is floating around as active gift cards, how much expired, how much got redeemed.
If you sell gift cards in your business and I have to ask you how many are active right now, you already know the answer.
It's not a spreadsheet problem. It's a visibility problem.
How many do you have active right now?
Sound familiar? With Clean up your data we check where every number comes from and what doesn't add up.