As part of your Loyalty program, you can customize expiration periods based on your customers’ last purchase date where they earned or redeemed loyalty. Setting loyalty expiration can help manage your Loyalty program and incentivize customers to make additional purchases. It also helps decrease risk by allowing you to control the amount of loyalty in circulation. 

We recommend reviewing your local consumer regulations before turning on the expiry feature.

When you set a loyalty expiration period, you may have customers with existing loyalty balances that will be affected by the change. If a customer has not earned or redeemed loyalty within the period you set, their loyalty balances will expire the day you set the expiry policy. 

After you have set the expiry period, Retail POS will review customer loyalty balances daily and loyalty will expire if no purchase where loyalty was earned or redeemed were made within the configured period.

Setting up Loyalty expiration

You can expire your customers’ loyalty balances based on inactivity from the time of their last purchase where loyalty was earned or redeemed. To set up Loyalty expiry:

1. Navigate to Setup > Loyalty.
   
2. Scroll to the Expiry section. 
3. The default is No expiry. To set up a Loyalty expiry, select Expiry based on customer last purchase date.
   
4. The default time period is 12 months. If a customer hasn’t earned or redeemed loyalty in 12 months, their loyalty will expire. This period can be adjusted to suit your needs from the drop-down list.
5. Click Save changes. 
   

Retail POS reviews customers' balances daily. If you’ve just turned on the feature, anticipate you may need to wait up to 24 hours for affected customers’ loyalty to expire.

We recommend communicating this change to your current customers and updating your Loyalty welcome emails as a way of communicating this feature to new customers.

Viewing loyalty balances in customer export

Loyalty liability 

To view the total amount of loyalty you have in circulation, you can use the customer export from the Customer page. This will help you better understand your loyalty liability so you can determine an expiration period that makes the most sense for your business. To do this:

1. Navigate to Customers.
2. Click Export list. The file will download automatically. 
   
3. Open the file using a spreadsheet program such as Open Office or Google Sheets. 
4. Locate the field called “loyalty_balance”.
5. Sum the values in this column to determine total loyalty in circulation. 

Determining customer impact

The first time you are adding an expiration, a pop-up will display under the loyalty settings with a reminder to notify the affected customers that their loyalty may expire due to this change.

To better determine which customers are affected, you can use the customer export from the Customer page. Here you can see all of your customers’ loyalty balances. You can then look at individual customers in Retail POS to see when their last transaction was. To do this: 

1. Navigate to Customers.
2. Click Export list. The file will download automatically. 
   
3. Open the file using a spreadsheet program such as Open Office or Google Sheets. 
4. Locate the field called “loyalty_balance”. Here you can filter to see all of the customers with a loyalty balance. You can then use this list to individually review a customer’s profile in Retail POS to understand when they last earned or redeemed loyalty.
5. In Retail POS, navigate to Customers and locate the customer you wish to review.
6. Click to expand the customer details.
7. Click View sales to find the customer’s last sale. 
   
8. If loyalty was redeemed, it will be noted in the sales record.
   
9. To determine if the customer earned loyalty on the transaction, click Print receipt.
   

Viewing customers’ loyalty expiry 

There are three ways to view a customer’s loyalty expiration and a history of any expired loyalty. 

• From the sell screen when the customer makes a new sale.
• From the sales history. 
• From the customer’s page under the Loyalty tab.

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