For instance, it’s sometimes prudent to save the transaction history for a GGF Visa before you shred the plastic card. You may have paid a bill or made an important purchase with that card and you might someday need the transaction history for warranty verification purposes. There are many reasons why you might want to save a gift card’s transaction history. Remember, you’re never going to receive a statement in the mail like regular debit and credit cards.

Instead of printing it out on paper which wastes ink, paper, and eventually has to be filed (something I’m terrible at), you can just print it to a PDF file and save it to your computer. For Microsoft Windows users click here for a good article that explains it better than I can.

Once you learn how to do it, I’m sure you’ll find many other tasks that you could apply this to.

NOTE: Since I used the Gene Grawe Fund Five Back Visa card’s transaction history in my example, I need to mention two other things about it. First, be sure to include the card number, expiration date, and security code in the filename of the PDF as that information is not in the transaction history. Second, if you’ve had that GGF Visa for a while, you might want to expand the date range of the transaction search in order to display all your transactions. When you first bring up the transaction history it defaults to just the last 60 days. Which won’t always be enough. I usually lower the last digit of the year in the From box by one (e.g. 2023 to 2022) and then click on Search again. Now, it displays the last 14 months, which is usually enough for my purposes.