Scheduled exports

Scheduled exports give you a daily snapshot of your gift card activity outside Cardigan, delivered to an SFTP server you control.

They're intended for loading into a data warehouse, BI tool or reconciliation process, so your finance and analytics teams can work with gift card data alongside everything else without needing access to the Cardigan admin.

What gets exported

Each run uploads two CSV files:

• Issued cards - every card Cardigan has issued, including its status, value, recipient details and provisioning timestamps.
• Redeemed cards - every redemption Cardigan has processed, including the Shopify order and transaction it relates to.

Exports are incremental. Each run only includes records that have changed since the last successful upload of that file, so you get a clean feed to append rather than a full snapshot to reconcile every day.

Files are named with the record type, your store's subdomain and a timestamp, for example cardigan_issued_cards_mystore_20260731020000.csv.

Issued cards columns

id, status, card_type, source, source_name, shopify_order_id, shopify_line_item_id, shopify_line_item_index, shopify_transaction_id, amount, currency_code, recipient_name, recipient_email, sender_name, message, delivery_date, card_number, provider_id, scheduled_at, provisioned_at, allocated_at, created_at, updated_at

Redeemed cards columns

id, status, shopify_order_id, shopify_order_name, shopify_transaction_id, shopify_payment_id, amount, currency_code, card_id, card_number, provider_id, created_at, updated_at

Setting up

Scheduled exports are configured from the Exports page in the Cardigan admin.

Enable scheduled exports

Nothing runs until this is switched on. You can save your connection details first and enable once you've confirmed they work.

Local run time

The hour of the day the export should run, in your store's own timezone. Defaults to 2am, which suits most stores - it's after the previous day's trading has settled and before anyone needs the data.

SFTP connection

• Host and Port - your SFTP server. Port defaults to 22.
• Username - the account Cardigan should connect as.
• Remote path - the directory to upload into. Defaults to /.

Authentication method

Two options are available.

Password authentication is the simpler option - enter the password for the account and Cardigan stores it encrypted.

SSH key authentication avoids storing a password at all. Choosing it reveals Cardigan's public key, which you add to the authorized_keys file for the account on your server. Cardigan holds the corresponding private key.

We'd recommend SSH key authentication where your server supports it.

Card number

Controls how card numbers appear in the exported files:

• Last 4 (the default) - only the final four digits of each card number. Enough to reconcile against a customer enquiry or match a record you already hold.
• Full number - the complete card number.

Testing your connection

The Test connection action attempts an SFTP connection using the details you've saved and reports back immediately.

Use it whenever you change your connection details - it's much faster than waiting for the next scheduled run to find out something's wrong.

Running an export manually

Run now triggers an export immediately, outside the normal schedule.

This is useful when you're setting things up and want to see real files land, or when you need today's data ahead of the scheduled time. A manual run advances the watermarks in the same way a scheduled run does, so the next scheduled run will only pick up what has changed since.

Only one run can be in progress at a time. Triggering a run while one is already going will be rejected rather than producing duplicate files.

Recent runs

The Recent runs section on the Exports page lists the most recent runs, showing when each started, whether each file uploaded successfully, how many rows it contained, and where it was uploaded to.

This is the first place to look when data appears to be missing.

If a run fails

Each file's watermark only advances when that file uploads successfully. If one file fails and the other succeeds, only the failed one is retried on the next run - so a transient problem resolves itself without you losing records or receiving duplicates.

Persistent failures are emailed to your notification recipients, so an export that has quietly stopped working doesn't go unnoticed.