Full-service restaurant gift-card launch checklist - stacking rules, refund terms, staff commissions, invoicing, and expiry, all closed before launch rather than in complaints

You are a marketing planning consultant for a full-service restaurant. Produce a Gift Card / Stored-Value Pre-Launch Checklist for sign-off before launch. Organize into six sections; every item has three columns: check item / pass standard / who confirms. The list must be usable directly as a sign-off sheet.

Program context: the restaurant plans a stored-value program (top up [amount], receive [bonus] tiers of card or member balance).

Six sections and their points (none may be dropped; add house-specific items freely, delete nothing):

1. Rules
- Stacking with other offers: can a card balance pay a bill that also carries a loyalty-day discount, a platform coupon, or a partner merchant perk - each combination written as "yes" or "no," no "depends"
- Where the bonus portion spends: alcohol, private room fees, banquets - item by item
- Per-bill redemption cap (e.g., maximum share of one check payable from balance)

2. Money
- Refund terms: on card cancellation, what happens to the bonus (clawed back pro-rata / clawed back in full / non-refundable), and are past meals re-priced at menu or discounted rates when computing the refund - must be fixed before launch; this is the single largest source of stored-value disputes
- Interaction with house accounts and banquet deposits: can a balance pay a deposit, and can a deposit refund return to the balance

3. Staff
- Commission basis: commission on top-up volume or on eventual redemption, and clawback on refunds - an undefined basis breeds overpromising at the table
- Verbal boundaries for the floor: staff may not promise anything the checklist has not fixed - list the three most dangerous forbidden lines (e.g., "refundable anytime," "the bonus is refundable too")

4. Finance & tax
- Invoice basis: issued at top-up or at spend, on the paid amount or including the bonus - marked "finance to confirm"; the checklist does not decide for finance
- Accounting treatment of the bonus portion - marked "finance to confirm"

5. Systems
- Expiry: validity period, expiry reminders, balance inquiry channels
- Cross-store or cross-brand usage; transferability and named-holder rules
- Can the POS actually enforce section 1's stacking rules - a rule the system cannot execute is not a rule; change the rule, not the system

6. Complaint playbook
- The three most likely dispute scenarios (refund, expiry, stacking conflict), each with one standard response line that maps one-to-one onto the rules above

End the checklist with a release rule: no launch while any "finance to confirm" item is unconfirmed; any failed item blocks launch of the section it belongs to until the rule passes.

Constraints:
- Recommend no specific top-up tiers or bonus percentages - that is a pricing decision; this checklist audits rule completeness only
- The finance and tax items offer no answers, only "finance to confirm" with the confirming role named
- No "builds brand loyalty" style framing of the program's meaning

Why it is written this way

The risk profile of a stored-value program differs categorically from a holiday promo: a bad holiday promo loses money once, a bad stored-value program plants a mine - every top-up is prepaid cash, and every undefined clause is a future dispute. Rules sit first among the six sections because everything downstream cites them: refund terms, commission basis, system behavior, and complaint responses are all the rules layer's dependents. One blurry cell there becomes three contradictions further down.

Refund terms carry their own flag as "the largest dispute source," and that is not rhetoric. The canonical stored-value dispute: a guest asks to cancel a card, a staff member says "sure," finance claws back the bonus per policy, and the guest discovers money "taken from them" - over terms nobody wrote down at launch. Fixing pro-rata versus full clawback and the re-pricing basis before launch converts that dispute from a negotiation into a recital.

The staff section lists the three most dangerous forbidden lines because commission pressure on stored-value selling reliably breeds overpromising: an employee chasing the sale says "refundable anytime," the money lands, the promiser eventually leaves, and the restaurant inherits the promise. A checklist cannot stop anyone from speaking, but posting the three likeliest violations as a training reference makes the most common overpromises visible.

The systems section's "a rule the system cannot execute is not a rule - change the rule, not the system" is a discipline aimed at the planner: it is easy to design stacking logic the POS cannot run (say, bonus tracked separately when the POS has no separate ledger), which sends every ticket back to manual cashier judgment - the exact mischarge trap again. Rules bowing to systems is no embarrassment; asking the counter to run rules from memory is.

Variables