Turning Off Your Rewards Program

Sooner or later somebody asks TORO to stop giving points away. Maybe you're rebuilding the program from scratch, maybe the margins stopped working, maybe one customer keeps gaming it. Those are three different problems, and TORO has three different switches — using the wrong one is how people end up thinking the program is off when it isn't.

So decide which of these you actually mean:

• One customer shouldn't earn. → Take one person out
• Nobody should earn for a while, but keep everything set up. → Pause the points
• This program is finished. → Retire a program

None of them touch the points people have already banked. That's a separate job, and it's covered at the bottom.

Take one person out

Open the customer's account, find the Rewards Program dropdown, and pick NO REWARDS. Save.

That's what the greyed-out NO REWARDS row in the rewards list is for — it's a real program that happens to earn nothing, and it's always offered in that dropdown even when it isn't in your active list. The customer keeps their account, their history, and any coupons they're already holding. They just stop accumulating.

Pause the points

This is the one most people are looking for, and it isn't the Active checkbox.

You can't set Points Per $ to zero — TORO won't accept anything below 0.1. Instead you use the rate schedule, which is allowed to pay nothing:

1. Open Manage Rewards Program, select your program, click * to edit it.
2. Click Points Rate Schedule… next to the Points Per $ box.
3. Click Add Rule. A new rule opens already set to Always, Every day, All day — which is exactly what you want here, so leave all three alone.
4. Give it a Name (it won't save without one — "Points paused" does the job), set the Rate to 0, and leave Active ticked.
5. Click Save Rule.

From that moment nobody on that program earns a point, and nothing else about your setup has moved — your rate, your threshold, your coupon and your customer assignments are all sitting exactly where you left them.

Your staff will see it too. The register's rewards chip switches from REWARDS PROMO to REWARDS PROGRAM NOTICE, reading "Reward Points Off Until…", so a cashier can answer the question before it's asked instead of guessing why a regular's balance stopped moving.

To start earning again, select the rule and click Delete Rule — or open it and untick Active if you'd rather keep it around for next time. Either way, everything picks up where it was.

Running more than one program? A rate rule belongs to the program you opened it from, so a store with two live programs needs the rule on each one.

Retire a program for good

When a program is genuinely finished — you're replacing it, or you built it by mistake — untick Rewards Program is Active at the top of the editor and Save.

What that does:

• The program drops off your working list. Untick Show Active Only in the viewer when you need to see it again — retiring is not deleting, and nothing is thrown away.
• It disappears from the Rewards Program dropdown on customer accounts, so nobody can be put on it by accident.
• It can't be the default. If you try, TORO says "Must set Reward Program to Active for it to be the Default."
• If it was your default, TORO drops the default back to NO REWARDS on its own, so nobody gets signed up to a retired program.

Two things to watch. If you have other programs still switched on, new customers will land on one of those — so retire the right ones, and check Set Default points where you want it afterwards. And retiring is about what people can join; if what you need is "nobody earns as of right now," pause the points first (above) and then retire at your leisure.

Just the extras, not the whole program

You don't have to switch everything off to stop one piece of it.

Birthday rewards — from the viewer, Manage Birthday Rewards Program, and untick Active. Watch this one closely: when you close the window with Active unticked, TORO asks "The Birthday Rewards Program is not active. Do you want it to be active?" Answering Yes turns it straight back on. If you meant to switch it off, answer No.

Anniversary, significant-other, Mother's Day and Father's Day messages — Manage Anniversary & Significant Other Birthday Reminder Messages, then untick the Send Reminder Messages box for whichever ones you're stopping. Each has its own switch.

The welcome coupon for new members — untick Send Welcome Reward Coupon in the Welcome Coupon panel of the program editor. Existing members are unaffected; it only ever applied to new ones.

Coupons printing at the register — untick Print Reward Coupons at the Register. That stops the paper, not the coupons: everything a customer earns still lands on their account for staff to pull up on the Apply Coupon screen.

What turning it off does not do

• Points already earned stay on the account. Every switch here changes what happens from now on. If you want balances back to zero, that's the Rewards Program Reset add-on, which zeroes every account in one pass and can be rolled back.
• Coupons already issued stay good. A reward that's already gone out is a live coupon with its own expiry date, and it'll still work at the register. Let them run out, or expire them individually.
• Punchcards and membership tiers keep working. They're separate systems; a points program going quiet doesn't touch either one.

"REWARDS PROGRAM IS INACTIVE!"

If a cashier tries to attach a customer to a sale and gets a message saying the rewards program is inactive and is part of the SMS Module, that isn't the Active checkbox — it's switched off at the store level because your store isn't set up for text messaging yet. Nothing in this article will clear it. Give us a call and we'll get the messaging side registered.

Turning it all back on

Every switch here is reversible, in the same place you flipped it. Retire a program and its customers, their balances and their history are all still there — tick Rewards Program is Active, press Set Default if it should be the one people join, and it picks up exactly where it stopped.