Existing Gift Card Use?

Derek,

Go into Notepad and swipe a card. If it enters just a serial number, then you can use it. If it has more info, probably not. ;-(

Or get a different card swipe just for gift and program it to read the cards

You can use the cards but just can't populate the inventory with them as you're considering because of the extra characters. When you sell one and swipe the card, a box will come up and say something like "Serial# Not Found, Would you like to create a new one", click yes and it will be added and available to tender. I'm ass

You just can't pre-populate the serial# table with them because the program doesn't know how to sequence a number with special characters around it.

Go ahead and test one as I described above and tender it and you'll see that it'll work just fine.

Rick Brown DataBasics

That depends on the card. Voucher Numbers can only be 20 characters long - if the cards are encoded with a small enough number that the data + the terminators is less than 20 characters it may work. I tried this with some pre-existing cards for a client and found that it would not work for their cards - I'm not sure if the data was just too large for the field or if the special characters interferred with the search for the card upon redemption.

The test card I have has 17 total characters but I just typed in more and see what you mean - it accepted the sale but cutoff the voucher# starting with the 21st character. Here's my 17 char string and it works fine. ;100000000000594? But when I added a few zero's, RMS accepted the sale but the voucher number in the POS lineitem on screen was truncated to 20 characters like you said.

I don't know what characters might not be searchable in a character string search, do you? I don't know anything about character sets and how or why they might differ from computer to computer - but I assume there are unusual issues arising from that once in awhile.

Anyone know - are those extra characters added so a credit card terminal recognizes the number as a gift card? Are those characters standard or are they programmed at the terminal?

Rick Brown DataBasics

"Glenn Adams [MVP - Retail Mgmt]" wrote in message news: snipped-for-privacy@TK2MSFTNGP14.phx.gbl...

Well, the "%" character is a wildcard in SQL, so that could confuse things and any time you put a single quote into a text field you have the possibility of gumming up the works. Lot of conjecture in that - I was just pointing out that odd character strings may not work out as well as a 'pure' number would...

I missed the last question in the post before...

The ";" and "?" are added by the MSR as begin and terminate data for the stripe. They need to be there so that RMS will process Credit and Debit cards correctly. To get rid of them, you would need a second MSR for swiping the gift cards - MSRs can be programmed to edit or remove the header/terminator strings...