Applying Discounts and Coupons
Whether it's a loyal customer getting 10% off, a birthday coupon from your SMS campaign, or a comp for an employee, TORO handles all of it from the same transaction screen. Here's how each one works — and the guardrails the system puts in place so nothing slips through the cracks.
Manual Discounts
Sometimes you just need to knock a few bucks off. Maybe the wrapper's damaged, maybe you're making a deal on a box purchase, maybe the customer's been coming in every week for three years and you want to say thanks.
During a transaction, tap the item (or items) you want to discount
Tap the Discount Item button
A discount type selector pops up — for most situations, choose Flat Discount
Toggle between Dollars or Percentage depending on what makes sense
Enter the amount in the large input field
Type a reason — this is required, and your store may enforce a minimum character count so you can't just type "x" and move on
Tap OK
The discount shows up as a line item in the transaction. The customer sees exactly what they saved, and it's all documented for your reports.
Beyond flat discounts, TORO has a few specialty types built in: Brand Buy X Get X (buy three of a brand, get one free), Buy Specific Get Specific (buy this item, get that item discounted), and Buy Specific Get Same (buy two of something, get the third at a reduced price). These are handy for structured promotions.
Coupons
Coupons are pre-built discounts with rules baked in. They're great for marketing campaigns because you set the terms once and TORO enforces them automatically.
During a transaction, tap Apply Coupon
Scan the coupon barcode or type the code manually
If the coupon requires a customer to be attached, tap Attach Phone Number and look them up
Tap Apply
Don't worry about spaces. If a customer reads a code off a receipt and you type it as "PEN 403", TORO still finds it.
TORO runs through a checklist before it'll honor the coupon: Is it active? Has it expired? Is today the right day of the week? Is it the right time of day? Does the transaction meet the minimum purchase amount? Has this customer already used it the maximum number of times? Do the items in the cart match what the coupon covers?
If everything checks out, the discount is applied. If something doesn't pass, TORO tells you exactly which rule failed — no guessing.
Picking a coupon instead of typing one
Most of the time you don't need the code at all. The Apply Coupon window can list the coupons that are actually available right now — the ones belonging to the customer on the sale, the store-wide ones anybody can use, or both. Tap the one you want and hit Apply. Double-tapping it applies it in one go.
When there's a customer on the transaction, their name and phone number sit at the top of the window so you know whose coupons you're looking at. When there isn't one yet, you'll see the Attach Phone Number To Transaction button instead — attach the customer and their coupons appear.
Expired coupons, ones the customer has already used up, and any coupon already on the sale are all left out, so what you see is what you can actually apply.
An owner or admin controls all of this from the Settings button at the bottom of the Apply Coupon window. There are three switches: show the customer's coupons, show the store's coupons, and hide expired/used-up ones. Both "show" switches are on by default, so the lists appear automatically the first time you open the window. They're independent — you can list only your store-wide promos and leave personal coupons off the screen, or the other way round. Turn both off and the window goes back to plain code entry.
The Edit Coupon button next to it opens the full details of whatever code is in the box, if you need to check a coupon's rules or change them.
Seeing what came off a line
Any line with money off it carries small tags showing where that money came from. A discount level
reads as the customer's level name, and each coupon gets its own tag beside it — a percentage coupon
shows its rate (C-30%), a dollar coupon shows the amount (C-$10.00), and a manual discount shows
as D-$5.00.
Coupons sit on the left and the customer's discount level always sits on the right, so once you know where to look the level is always in the same place.
Right-click any tag to open the breakdown. It lists every discount on that line separately — each coupon by its code with what it took off, the discount level, and the total saved on that line. This is the quickest way to answer "why is this cigar $38 and not $45?" without unpicking the sale.
If a coupon was spread across several items, right-clicking its tag on the coupon's own line shows every item it touched and what it took off each one, so you can see the whole coupon at once rather than line by line.
The breakdown opens as a small card headed Discounts — or Coupon — items when you
opened it from the coupon's own line. Close it with the ✕ in its top right corner. It's only a
readout, so nothing changes while it's open.
Taking a discount back off
A coupon sits on the sale as its own line, and that line carries a − button instead of the usual quantity and + — there's nothing to count, so the only thing to do with it is take it off. Press − and TORO asks you to confirm first: Remove Coupon? for a coupon, naming the code so you know which one you're about to pull, or Remove Discount? when you're taking off the customer's discount. Nothing comes off the sale until you say yes, so a mis-tap at the counter is harmless.
How tax is figured on a discounted line
Tax is calculated on what's left after the discount, not on the original price. That's true for a percentage coupon and for a dollar-off one, and it holds for the dollar coupons your rewards program hands out — reward, welcome, and birthday — as well as the Customer Discount button.
Worth knowing if you're comparing old receipts: dollar-off coupons used to be taxed on the pre-coupon amount, so the tax on those sales was higher than it should have been. That's corrected, and a dollar coupon now behaves the same way a percentage one always has.
What the Discounts report leaves out
The Discounts report covers customer discounts, and it deliberately leaves employee point purchases out. A note at the top of the report says how many were excluded and how much they came to, so nothing is hidden — it just isn't mixed in. Employees buy at a deep points discount, and folding that into the totals would make your customer-discount numbers look far worse than they are.
To look at those separately, open Advanced Reporting → High Risk Events → Employee Purchase Cigars.
Using more than one coupon on a sale
A sale can take more than one coupon, but only when every coupon involved is set up to allow it. Each coupon has an Allow to be used with other coupons setting in the coupon editor, and it's off unless somebody turns it on — so nothing already in a customer's hands changes on its own.
Because it works both ways, a second coupon only goes on if the one already there allows company and the new one does too. If either says no, TORO tells you which coupon is in the way so you can decide whether to take it off.
Two other rules keep this sensible at the counter:
- Minimum purchases add up. Two "$10 off a $50 purchase" coupons want a $100 sale, not a $50 one. If the sale isn't big enough, TORO tells you what the coupons need together and what the sale currently is — so if the customer wants to add another box, you can ring it up and apply the coupon straight away.
- Free-item coupons are always on their own. A coupon that gives away a single item — a free cigar, or a percentage off one item — can't share a sale with any other coupon, because it claims one item for itself and a second one would be fighting over the same stick. In the coupon editor that setting is greyed out for this type, so you'll see up front that it isn't an option. At the register, TORO tells you the coupon can't be combined and which one to take off first.
If you take an item off the sale and that leaves a coupon with nothing to discount, TORO moves it to the next item it fits. When there's nothing left for it at all, it tells you the coupon is being removed rather than leaving it sitting on the sale doing nothing.
For the coupons your rewards program hands out, the same setting lives in the program itself — the Reward Coupon and Welcome Coupon panels each have a Stackable with other coupons box, and birthday coupons have one on each tier. Set it once there and every coupon that goes out is created that way. All of them start switched off. If you set your reward coupon to Discount On Item, that box greys out for the reason above.
Birthday tiers also control the other stacking switch. Each tier has an Allow to be used with other discounts box that decides whether that tier's birthday coupon can sit on top of a customer's discount level or a manual discount. Like the rest, it starts switched off — so if you want your birthday coupons to keep combining with a member discount, tick it on the tiers you care about. For reward and welcome coupons the equivalent control is the Allow Rewards on Discounted Items box on the rewards program itself.
Coupon types you'll see:
Percent Off — a percentage discount, sometimes with a maximum dollar cap so 20% off doesn't get out of hand on a $500 box
Amount Off — a flat dollar amount off the transaction or qualifying items
Percent Off Item — a percentage off a specific item (set it to 100% and the item is free)
Employee Comp
This one's for when your staff gets their shift smoke or whatever your employee benefit looks like.
During the transaction, tap the Employee Complimentary button (it's on the payment screen). You'll need to enter a reason. Each employee has a daily comp allowance, and TORO tracks usage against that limit. Sales tax is removed automatically on comped items — you're not paying tax on product you're giving away.
Store Comp
The Store Complimentary button works like Employee Complimentary but without a dollar limit. It's for situations where you're comping something at the store's expense — a customer had a bad experience, you're donating to an event, whatever the reason. A reason is still required, and tax is still removed.
The Guardrails
TORO doesn't just let anyone discount anything by any amount. Here's how it stays controlled:
Discount limits are tied to access levels. If an employee tries to give a bigger discount than their role allows, TORO blocks it and asks for a manager override. The manager enters their PIN to authorize it.
Item max discounts apply everywhere now. Every item can carry a max discount (set on the item's SKU, or as a default on its product type) — and that ceiling now applies to coupons and the Customer Discount button, not just manual discounts. A dollar coupon moves what it can't put on a capped item onto the other eligible items, so the customer still gets full value whenever the cart allows it; a percentage coupon simply stops at each item's ceiling. When a ceiling changes what a coupon could do, TORO says so right on screen ("Some items are limited by their max discount setting"), so the cashier can explain it instead of guessing. An item with a max discount of zero can't be discounted by a coupon at all — that's the setting doing its job. Accounts flagged to ignore max item discounts are exempt, same as they've always been for manual discounts.
Reasons are always required. Every discount, every comp, every coupon — there's a paper trail. This shows up in your Discount Report so you can see who's discounting, how much, and why.
Stacking rules are configurable per coupon, and there are two separate switches. Allow to be used with other discounts controls whether a coupon can sit on top of a customer's discount level or a manual discount. Allow to be used with other coupons controls whether it can share a sale with another coupon. Both are off unless you turn them on, and the second one isn't available at all on a Discount On Item coupon.
Everything is tracked. The Discount Report and Discount Impact Report in the Advanced Reporting Module show you the full picture — total discounts given, impact on margins, which employees are discounting the most, and whether your coupons are actually driving sales or just giving away margin.