Gift cards are one of the highest-margin products a salon can sell. They pull in cash before any service is performed, they bring new faces through the door, and the small share of value that is never redeemed — breakage — drops straight to the bottom line. The catch is that in Croatia a gift card is not a simple cash transaction. It sits at the intersection of two laws: the fiscalisation law (ZFPG) and the VAT law (Zakon o PDV-u, which transposes the EU Voucher Directive 2016/1065). Get the VAT timing wrong and you either pay tax twice or under-report it. This post explains how F9.contact handles both, and why the multi-purpose voucher (MPV) treatment is the correct one for a personal-care business.
Two laws, two questions
It helps to separate the two questions that a gift card raises, because they are governed by different statutes and answered at different moments.
The first question is when must a fiscal receipt be issued? That is the fiscalisation law's domain. ZFPG is a cash-register law: it is triggered by a payment received from a consumer, not by an abstract notion of "sale". When a customer hands over money for a gift card, you have received a payment, so a fiscalised receipt is issued at that moment and FINA returns a JIR.
The second question is when does VAT become chargeable? That is the VAT law's domain, and the answer depends on what kind of voucher you sold.
These two questions are easy to conflate. The mistake we want to avoid is reasoning that "no VAT at sale" means "no receipt at sale". It does not. A receipt is always issued at sale. The only open question is what VAT rate appears on the gift-card line of that receipt.
Single-purpose vs multi-purpose vouchers
The EU Voucher Directive draws a line between two categories.
A single-purpose voucher (SPV) is one where the place of supply and the VAT due are both known at the moment it is issued. Think of a voucher that can only ever be exchanged for one specific 25%-rated service. Because everything is determined up front, VAT becomes chargeable at sale.
A multi-purpose voucher (MPV) is everything else: a voucher that can be redeemed against a range of supplies whose VAT treatment is not fixed in advance. For an MPV, VAT is not chargeable when the voucher is sold. It becomes chargeable only when the voucher is redeemed, against whatever is actually supplied.
A salon gift card is, by its nature, multi-purpose. The holder can spend it on a cut, a colour, a course of treatments, or retail product on the shelf — and those supplies can sit at different VAT rates. At the moment you sell the card you genuinely do not know what it will be exchanged for. That is the textbook definition of an MPV.
This classification is not an accounting nicety. It determines whether you are collecting VAT once or, in the worst case, twice on the same euro.
Why MPV is the right call
Treating a salon gift card as an SPV — charging full VAT at sale — leads to a double-VAT trap. You would remit VAT when the card is bought, and then, because the services supplied at redemption carry their own VAT, you would remit it again. The customer's euro gets taxed twice. For a salon with a single VAT rate across everything it sells, an SPV reading is at least internally consistent; but the moment your menu mixes rates — services at one rate, retail product at another — the SPV approach becomes legally questionable and is the kind of thing an audit flags.
The MPV treatment avoids all of that. No VAT on the gift-card line at sale; full, correct VAT at redemption on the specific services or products the customer actually takes. This is the cleaner reading under the directive, and it is the model F9.contact implements after confirming the approach with FINA and a Croatian accountant.
What happens on the receipt at sale
When your front desk sells a gift card through the F9.contact point-of-sale picker, the flow is deliberately boring — which is exactly what you want from anything fiscal.
The card appears as its own line on the invoice at 0% VAT. That zero is correct: under the MPV rule no VAT is yet chargeable. Behind the scenes, the card's value is added to FINA's IznosOslobPdv field — the VAT-exempt amount — in the fiscalised XML. The receipt is fiscalised normally, FINA returns its identifiers, and the customer walks out with a printed code in the format GC-XXXX-XXXX-XXXX. The card flips to Active.
A few deliberate design choices support compliance and tidy bookkeeping:
- Preset denominations only. Cashiers choose from values you configure in advance (the defaults are €25, €50, €100, €200). They cannot key in an arbitrary amount at the counter. If you need a new value, you add it as a preset in settings first. This keeps the fiscal record consistent and predictable.
- A bilingual PDF receipt. An A5 PDF in English and Croatian carries the legal MPV clause so the customer — and your accountant — can see exactly why the line is zero-rated.
- Optional recipient email. If you record a recipient address before marking the invoice paid, the branded card PDF is emailed automatically when payment lands.
What happens at redemption
Redemption is where the VAT finally lands, and it lands on reality rather than on a guess.
The customer comes in, books their service, and at payment the front desk selects Gift card as the payment method and enters the code. The services on that invoice carry their normal VAT rates, exactly as they would for any cash- or card-paying customer. The gift card is not a zero-rated service here — it is simply the means of payment. In the fiscal record it surfaces as an InvoicePayment row with FINA's payment-method code O (Ostalo, "other"), because the FINA schema has no voucher-specific method and accepts a single payment method per receipt.
Partial redemptions are handled cleanly. Spend €60 of a €100 card and the remaining €40 stays on the card until it expires. No cash change is given for the difference — a gift card is value to be spent, not a cash instrument. Each redemption is logged with the invoice, the amount, the date, and who processed it, so the card's full history is auditable.
Expiry and breakage
Cards carry a configurable validity period — 365 days by default, or set it to zero for no expiry at all. A daily background job sweeps cards whose validity has lapsed with a balance still on them and flips their status to Expired.
That leftover, unredeemed value is breakage, and here the MPV treatment pays off again: because no VAT was ever charged at sale, there is no VAT to adjust or claw back when a card expires unredeemed. The breakage is simply revenue you recognise, with no fiscal event attached. Compare that to an SPV world, where you would have remitted VAT on a supply that never happened and would then need to unwind it.
A quick reference
| Event | VAT on the line | FINA encoding |
|---|---|---|
| Sale of a €100 card | None (0%) | Card value added to IznosOslobPdv |
| Redeem €60 against services | Services carry their own rates | Pdv[] on services; card is an InvoicePayment, method O |
| Remaining €40 | Stays on the card | No fiscal event until next redemption |
| Expiry with a balance left | Status change only | No fiscal event (MPV breakage) |
The takeaway
Gift cards are a genuinely good idea for a personal-care business, and the Croatian rules around them are less daunting than they first look once you separate the two questions. A receipt is always issued at sale, because the fiscalisation law cares about money received. VAT, however, follows the multi-purpose-voucher rule: nothing at sale, full and correct VAT at redemption on what is actually supplied, and nothing to unwind on breakage. F9.contact builds that logic into the point of sale so your front desk does the obvious thing and the books come out right.