Setting Up Your Receipt
Your receipt is a tiny piece of marketing that goes home with every customer. Most shops set it up once and forget about it, but it's worth getting right — and worth revisiting a few times a year to keep the footer message fresh.
What You Can Customize
The header sits at the top of every receipt and covers the basics:
Store name
Street address, city, state, zip
Phone number
Your logo, if your thermal printer supports graphics (most modern ones do)
This is what identifies your business, so make sure it's accurate. If you move locations or change your phone number, update it here so customers aren't calling a dead line.
The body is handled automatically by TORO — prices, quantities, tax breakdown, payment details. You don't need to fuss with this. The one part of the body you can change is how item names print — see Long Item Names or Short Ones below.
The footer is where it gets interesting. This is your free real estate at the bottom of every receipt:
A thank-you message or return policy
Your website and social media handles
Seasonal promotions or upcoming events
An optional transaction barcode for quick lookups
The footer is the part most stores underuse. "Thank you for shopping with us!" is fine, but "Join us for our Anniversary Sale — 20% off all accessories Oct 15-20" is better.
How to Set It Up
Open the Dashboard, click the TORO Configuration tab on the left, and click the Set Up System card. (Can't find it? Type "settings" in the search box at the top right.)
Open the Printers tab and click Set Up Receipts.
Add your logo: click Set Logo and pick any image (PNG or JPG). A crop window opens with an adjustable box — drag the box to reposition it, or drag its corners and edge handles to resize it, and zoom in for precision. Click Use Selection and TORO sizes and saves it automatically — you don't need to resize or edit the image beforehand.
Use the toggles to choose what else appears — your store address, phone number, website, social media, store hours, upcoming events, a return policy, and an extra note.
Set your display options:
Show Discount Detail Per Item (on by default) — when on, each discounted item prints its original price and exactly what came off, with any coupon and member/manual discount listed right under the item (for example,
COUPON | 100% off = -$12.00). Turn it off if you'd rather each item just show its final price and keep the discount breakdown to the summary at the bottom of the receipt.Combine All Taxes Into One Line (off by default) — see One Tax Line or Several below.
Totals in Large Font (on by default) — prints the Pay Cash / Pay Credit lines and the Total Savings line bigger and easier to read.
The suggested-tip table used to have a Tips in Large Font tick box here too. It now has its own three-way size — Normal, Large or Extra Large — over in Set Up Tips, beside your tip note lines and suggested percentages. See Setting Up Tips.
Click Save.
Use Save & Test Print Your Receipt to print a sample and make sure everything looks right.
Changes take effect immediately. The very next receipt printed will use your new settings.
Long Item Names or Short Ones
Every item in TORO carries two names. Open any item and you'll see them stacked at the top of the details panel: Full Name — the whole thing, like Padron 1964 Anniversary Series Torpedo Maduro — and Short Name underneath it. The Short Name is capped at 18 characters, because that's all the room a receipt line has. TORO writes one for you automatically when the item is created, and you can retype it and click Update Short Name whenever you like.
Which name actually gets used is up to you, and it's two separate settings — one for the paper, one for the screen your cashier is looking at:
On the receipt — in Set Up Receipts, find the Items & Taxes on Receipt box and tick Use Short Name For Items.
On the sale screen — go back to the Setup tab, click Set Up Transactions & Tabs, and in the Sale Item List box along the bottom tick Use short item names.
Out of the box TORO uses the full name in both places. They're deliberately independent, because most shops want opposite things from them: the cashier wants the full name on screen — it's how you tell two similar sizes or wrappers apart mid-sale — while the receipt wants the short one so long names don't run off the edge of the paper.
If an item has no Short Name filled in, TORO falls back to its Full Name, so you'll never get a blank line.
One thing to know: the short name is applied as the item is rung up. If you reprint an older receipt, or print the receipt for a tab that was started earlier, you'll see full item names even with the receipt setting turned on.
One Tax Line or Several
If your shop sits in a city that stacks its own taxes on top of the state's, the bottom of every receipt can get busy. A Philadelphia store, for example, prints a state sales tax line, a city sales tax line, a city tobacco tax line, and then the Total Tax — and any tax that didn't apply to that particular sale still prints its own $0.00 line.
In Set Up Receipts, the Items & Taxes on Receipt box has a setting called Combine All Taxes Into One Line. Tick it and all of that collapses to a single row:
Total Tax = $13.11
Total = $171.86
The amount is identical either way — this only changes how the tax is displayed on the receipt, never how it's calculated. Your Monthly and Quarterly Sales Tax Reporting still breaks every tax out separately, jurisdiction by jurisdiction, which is what you actually file from.
The setting ships off, so if you've never touched it your receipts look exactly as they always have. It applies to both the guest copy you hand over before payment and the completed receipt afterward.
Before you turn it on: a few states require a receipt to state certain taxes separately, and some tobacco excise taxes carry their own disclosure rules. It's a two-minute question for whoever does your sales tax — worth asking once rather than reprinting a year of receipts.
Receipt Delivery Options
Not everyone wants a paper receipt, and TORO gives you flexibility here:
SMS — if the customer has opted in and has a phone number on file, the receipt goes straight to their phone.
Email — if the customer has an email address on file, they'll get a digital copy.
Print — the thermal printer spits out a paper receipt.
No receipt — for regulars who just don't want one.
You can set a default preference on each customer's account. So if Mike always wants his receipt texted and Sarah prefers email, TORO remembers and handles it automatically at checkout. No asking every time.
Defaults for New Guests
For a customer who hasn't set a preference yet, TORO falls back to a store-wide default you control — and it lives right on this same screen. On Setup Receipts, find the Receipt Method for New Guests panel (below the logo panel on the right) and check the methods you want pre-selected at checkout — Text Message (SMS), E-Mail, Print — for any guest who hasn't chosen for themselves. (This panel used to live on the Setup Transactions, Tabs, Tips & Items screen; it moved here where it belongs.)
Out of the box, Text Message (SMS) is on and E-Mail and Print are off. Whatever you set here is only the starting point: the moment a guest picks their own preference, that choice sticks to their account and takes over from the store default.
A quick note on SMS: a receipt text only sends if the customer has opted in to messaging and has a phone number on file. If you'd rather not nudge new guests toward text receipts, just uncheck Text Message (SMS) in that panel and the toggle will start unselected at the register.
Tips From Stores That Get It Right
Keep it concise. Thermal receipt paper is narrow. Long lines of text wrap awkwardly and make the receipt harder to read. Short, punchy messages work best.
Rotate your footer. Change it monthly or seasonally. Promote your next event, highlight a new product line, remind people about your loyalty program. It's free advertising that goes directly into your customer's pocket.
Include your return policy. This sounds boring, but it saves real headaches. When the policy is printed right on the receipt, there's no "well nobody told me" conversation later.
Don't worry about reprints. Every transaction is saved in TORO regardless of whether a receipt was printed, emailed, or skipped entirely. If a customer comes back needing a copy, you can reprint from Transaction History anytime.