Moving gift cards to a new store: prove the opening customer balances

Export the gift-card register immediately before the migration cutoff. Retain each stable card identifier, currency, original issue reference, current balance and status. Reconcile the total to the existing accounting schedule before importing anything. If the source register already contains unexplained differences, moving it into another platform will preserve those differences while making their history harder to investigate.

Shopify documents gift-card exports and individual records containing original and current balances, purchase-order references and a transaction timeline. Use the equivalent evidence from the outgoing system. Avoid circulating full redemption codes in ordinary finance spreadsheets when a restricted identifier is enough to reconcile the balance. Protect the export as customer financial information.

Give imported cards a migration reference that the accountant and connector can recognize. Their face values describe existing customer entitlements; they do not establish that new cash arrived during the import. Preserve whether each balance originated from a purchased card, a return or a promotional issue because the accounting treatment can differ under the company's policy.

For a hypothetical migration, 300 cards carry total remaining value of $14,250. Importing those same balances should leave the customer entitlement total at $14,250 before subsequent activity. If the integration also records $14,250 as new paid gift-card sales, the import has created a second financial event. Trace the connector's posting behavior on a controlled test before processing the full population.

Document any unsupported historical field and retain it in the controlled archive. A new system may not accept an old issue date or reason code, but the underlying evidence can still be preserved outside the operational record.

Set a clear last transaction included in the source export and first transaction accepted by the destination. Capture redemptions, refunds and new issuance during the interval. Assign one person to reconcile that change population. Without an activity bridge, the new store may start with a balance that was correct hours earlier but has since been partly spent.

Confirm how the business prevents the same entitlement from being redeemed in both systems after cutover. Use the platforms' supported migration and deactivation procedures, with a rollback plan approved by the operating owner. Do not disable customer access until the replacement mechanism is ready and the customer can obtain appropriate assistance. Keep screenshots or logs of the final control state.

Test a fully unused card, a partially used card and a balance with relevant restrictions through the supported test process. Verify that redemption reduces the correct customer balance and reaches the expected accounting account. Include a refund to the stored value where the platform supports it. Reconcile the destination total by currency rather than adding unlike currencies into one unexplained number.

The migration signoff should show the exported balance, intervening activity, accepted import, rejected rows and final total. Assign every rejected or disputed balance an owner and a customer resolution route. Retain the outgoing transaction history for the applicable record policy, since future refunds and customer inquiries may refer to purchases made before the new store existed.