If you run finance for a multi-location business, you already know the problem automated clearinghouse solves, even if you've never called it that. Say a customer buys a gift card online, but always redeems it at the physical location closest to home. Every time they come in, that location hands over real inventory, but the sale that paid for it happened on your website, not at that store's till. Multiply that by every location, every week, and someone on your team is stuck figuring out who's owed what, by hand, indefinitely.
Here's why finance teams who've automated this step aren't going back.
1. No Location Eats Another's Redemptions
In the example above, the redeeming location is quietly covering a cost it never got paid for. If nothing reconciles that, it's the location that gets shopped at most, not the one that sold the least, that ends up short.
Automated clearinghouse fixes this at the source. When a gift card is sold, its value is held in a corporate clearinghouse account. When it's redeemed somewhere else, that location gets paid out of the account automatically. No location absorbs a sale it didn't make.
2. It's Not Manual Anymore
Reconciling location-level liability by hand usually means someone pulling reports, cross-referencing redemptions against sales, and calculating what each location is owed before cutting a transfer. It's slow, it's repetitive, and it's exactly the kind of task that eats a real chunk of a finance team's week for no reason other than nobody's built a better system yet.
Automated clearinghouse handles the calculation and the transfer. Fund movement happens through EFT file generation, so the money actually moves instead of just getting logged as something owed.
3. Loyalty Gets the Same Treatment
Gift card liability is the obvious half of this problem, but loyalty liability creates the exact same imbalance. A customer earns points or a free item at one location and redeems it at another, and now that second location has covered the cost of a reward it didn't sell into. Automated clearinghouse settles loyalty liability the same way it settles gift cards, valuing points and free-item rewards against your program's ratios and paying out the redeeming location accordingly.
4. Finance Gets a Real Paper Trail
Every transfer comes with detailed liability reporting across all locations, so nobody has to reconstruct what happened after the fact. When a location's numbers look off, the report already explains why. And since transfers can run daily, weekly, bi-weekly, or monthly, with gift card and loyalty programs on separate schedules if you need it, finance sets the cadence instead of working around a fixed one.
FAQs
What is automated clearinghouse?
Automated clearinghouse moves gift card and loyalty liability between your locations and head office, so each store is reimbursed for redemptions it didn't originally sell.
How does gift card liability get settled between locations?
When a gift card is sold, its value is held in a corporate clearinghouse account. When it's redeemed at another location, that location is paid out from the account.
How does loyalty liability get settled?
The same way. Points or free items earned at one location are valued and held centrally, then paid out to whichever location the reward is redeemed at.
How often does money move between accounts?
Daily, weekly, bi-weekly, or monthly. You can run gift card and loyalty transfers on different schedules.
Is this available on my plan?
Automated clearinghouse is available on DataCandy's enterprise plan, and full automation depends on your bank. Some banks require a manual EFT file transfer instead. Contact us to confirm compatibility.