Discount Gift Certificates for Outside Sale

Hi all,

We are investigating an opportunity to sell gift cards through an outside vendor for a limited period of time. These gift cards would be discounted (for example, the value of the card is $100 but the customer at this vendor would pay $80) and would have restrictions on what it can be used towards.

I did suggest using a voucher instead but my team is insistent on making this a gift certificate.

I haven't done much work on this yet but have a few ideas. I'm thinking of building a new gift certificate type that can be restricted from redemption online which will help us control the situations in which it is redeemed as the customer will have to phone or come in person and speak with a customer service rep. I know that payment methods can be difficult to restrict from super specific types of transactions so this is the best way I can think of for that.

As for getting the certificates out of our system, I'm planning on selling a bunch of cards at full value using a dummy payment method to a dummy account for the vendor. We won't be receiving payment from the vendor until after they have received and started selling the cards so I won't have any actual money to pay in Tessitura anyway. This also makes redemption from a Tessitura standpoint very easy. The customer service rep simply redeems it like any other gift card and can use the full value - easy peasy.

My concerns mainly lie in how to make this all tie in to our accounting software (we use Financial Edge) and make sense when we want to report on this initiative. Will my idea create confusion anywhere? Is there a better way we can be doing things that will make things easier for GL reconciliation? Are there reporting issues using this approach I might not be considering?

I guess, in a nutshell, I'm actually wondering if anyone else has done something similar and can offer advice on what they did or whether I'm heading in the right direction!

Thanks!