Building and Managing Coupons

This is the back-office side of coupons — building them and keeping the list tidy. For what happens at the register when a coupon goes on a sale, see Applying Discounts and Coupons.

The Coupon Editor

Open a coupon and you get its value, who can use it, and when.

As you set the discount, TORO now spells out what the coupon is actually worth in large type — $5.00 OFF, 30% OFF — so you can see at a glance whether you've built what you meant to.

Percentages Are Entered as a Decimal

This is the single thing stores get wrong most often, so it's worth stating plainly:

0.1 = 10%. 0.25 = 25%. 1 = 100%.

Type 10 into a percentage coupon and you have not made a 10% coupon — you have made a 1000% one. The editor carries a note reminding you, and the big value display above will show you what you've built before you save it. Read it before you press Save.

Putting a Dollar Ceiling on a Percentage Coupon

A percentage coupon can also carry a max value in dollars — "10% off, up to $15." On a big enough sale, the coupon stops at the ceiling instead of growing with the total, and the register tells the cashier ("Max discount of $15.00 was reached for coupon"). It applies to the percentage types only; a dollar-amount coupon is its own maximum. Leave the field blank (or zero) for no ceiling.

One more guardrail that applies at the register, not in this editor: every item's own max discount (set on the item or its product type) now limits coupons too. A coupon can never push an item's total discount past that ceiling — see Applying Discounts and Coupons for how that looks during a sale.

The Two "Allow" Boxes Are Not the Same Thing

There are two separate settings and they answer two different questions:

• Allow to be used with other coupons — can this coupon share a sale with another coupon? Both coupons must have it ticked. If either one says no, the second coupon is refused and TORO names the one that's blocking it.
• Allow to be used with other discounts — can this coupon come off an item that already has a member or manual discount on it?

Both start switched off. That's deliberate, so nothing already in your customers' hands starts behaving differently than it did yesterday.

One kind of coupon is always used alone: a coupon that gives away a single item — a free cigar, or a percentage off one item — can't be combined with another coupon, because it claims an item for itself and a second coupon would be fighting over the same stick. For that type the combine box is unticked and greyed out, so you can see up front that it isn't an option.

Restricting It to One Customer

Restrict to a Single Phone Number has a LOOKUP button beside it. Press it, find the customer the way you always do, and their number drops straight in — and the restriction ticks itself on.

Much better than typing a number from memory, which is how coupons end up restricted to a phone number that belongs to nobody.

Dates, Days and Item Lists

The rest of the editor is windows and lists: start and end dates, time-of-day, days of the week, and allow/restrict lists for specific items and product types. Set as few or as many as the promotion needs.

Building One From Another

Making a run of similar coupons used to mean retyping twenty settings each time.

Open any coupon and press CREATE COUPON LIKE THIS. TORO saves the one you're on, closes it, and opens a fresh copy carrying every setting — the discount, the dates, the day-of-week rules, the item and product-type lists. Change the one thing that's different and press Save.

The copy gets its own new coupon code automatically, and nothing is saved until you save it, so you can back out and lose nothing.

The Coupon Viewer

The button that gets you there is View Coupons. It used to say "Modify Existing Coupon", which rather undersold it.

The list opens clean. Expired coupons are hidden to begin with, so you see the handful that are still live instead of scrolling past years of dead ones. A Hide Expired box in the search row starts ticked — untick it when you want the history back. Coupons with no expiration date always show.

Expired and switched-off coupons are dimmed, so what's still good is obvious without reading the End Date on every row.

You can search by code, description or uses, and Show Customer Name adds the customer to each row — it updates the list the moment you tick it.

A Customer's Own Coupon List

Open a customer's coupons and everything is colour-coded, across two columns:

Dates — green when the coupon can be used right now, yellow when it can't be used yet (it starts later, or today isn't one of its days), red when it's expired or switched off.

Uses Remaining — green while there are uses left, red at zero. Where a coupon is capped per person, this counts what that customer has left ("2 Uses Left For This Customer") rather than a shared total that may not apply to them.

The list opens showing only what that customer can actually redeem today. Show Expired, Show Inactive and Show Store Coupons widen it, and TORO remembers how you left them.