Overview

A client’s application enables a user to perform a balance inquiry on a gift card to check its remaining balance. The user selects a card managed or purchased through the application and sends a request to get card balance. Not all gift cards support balance inquiry.

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Learn More

Learn more about how to perform balance inquiries with our Balance Inquiry Tutorials.

Process

The client application can make the following Balance Inquiry Calls based on the use case:

• verifyAccount
• readAccount

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Any Balance Inquiry APIs can be used. This table lists only the most appropriate and economical Balance Inquiry calls for the listed scenarios

Best Practices

• The supported feature value UNIVERSAL BALANCE INQUIRY and PARTIAL_BALANCE_INQUIRY indicates if the balance inquiry is supported.
• PARTIAL_BALANCE_INQUIRY => Balance Inquiry definition that supports only in-network gift cards i.e. cards sold on/by Blackhawk Network platform.
• UNIVERSAL BALANCE INQUIRY => Balance Inquiry definition that supports balance inquiry on out of network gift cards i.e. cards sold out of Blackhawk Network platform.
• The product Line pinRequired attribute indicates if the PIN is needed to make a Balance Inquiry call. This field enforces the use of PIN.
• Client application should provide a limit on the Balance Inquiry calls being made by each user per product per day.
• If there is an error or timeout while getting the balance, then the API returns the cached balance. The client application can determine if the balance is current or not by looking at the account isBalanceStale and balanceAsOf attributes.