🌟 The Polish & Portal Update
The biggest update since Insight launched. The new Customer Portal lets owners log in from any browser. Credit-card fees can now bend for individual customers and membership tiers. Purchase orders and vendor tools got a real tune-up. The updater is bulletproof — one click runs a full health check with two one-click fixes. And the modern main screen learned a pile of new tricks. v821 is a lot of work. Every screen that bothered you a little is a little better. You can now waive or lower the card fee for specific customers without anyone touching a button at the counter. The updater stops surfacing scary technical errors and starts helping you fix them. Purchase orders stop fighting you. The Item Catalog feels finished. And the foundations are in for the brand-new TORO Customer Portal at portal.torocigarpos.com.🧑🏭 TORO Customer Portal — Owner Access from Any Browser
Generate a pairing code from the POS. Owner sets up at portal.torocigarpos.com. Done. The new TORO Customer Portal lives at portal.torocigarpos.com — a single owner-facing site for billing, proposals, and the Think Tank, all without needing the POS app. v821 ships the POS-side controls so you can grant and manage portal access right from the Insight Control Panel. Two new admin-only cards appear under Insight Control Panel:- Portal Pairing Code — one click generates an 8-character code (formatted like
ABCD-EFGH) with a live 30-minute countdown. Hand it to the owner; they redeem it at portal.torocigarpos.com to set up their portal account on their own time. Copy and Regenerate buttons are right there. - Portal Users — lists every user who has portal access, with per-user feature flags for billing, proposals, and Think Tank. Edit flags or revoke access entirely in two clicks. Revoke is instant: the next time they click anything in the portal, they’re signed out.
| 📘 Help Manual | TORO Customer Portal |
| ⚡ Speed | ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ |
| 💰 Revenue | ⭐⭐⭐⭐ |
| 🎯 Ease of Use | ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ |
💳 Credit-Card Fees That Bend for the Right Customers
Waive or lower the card fee for a specific customer or a whole membership tier — no button-pushing at the counter. Until now, your card-payment fee (or cash discount) applied to every card sale on a configured payment type, no exceptions — the only way around it was a cashier remembering to hit No Fee on each sale. v821 gives you two cleaner ways to vary the fee by who’s buying. 1. Exempt a customer entirely. Tag any account with the new NO CREDIT CARD FEES tag and that customer skips the fee at checkout automatically — no button, every time, on every register. Perfect for an owner’s own account, a partner, or a VIP you’ve promised never pays the surcharge. 2. Set a different rate for a tag or a membership level. On each fee in Set Up → Credit Card, you can now add overrides — for example, “V3 Monthly members pay 2% instead of 3%,” or “Wholesale-tagged accounts pay 0%.” An override of 0% waives the fee cleanly with no stray penny on the receipt. If a customer matches more than one rule, the most generous one wins, so you never accidentally over-charge a good customer. It’s entirely opt-in. Every existing customer is untouched until you decide to tag them or add an override — nothing changes behind your back. How to activate: Tag a customer from their account screen (NO CREDIT CARD FEES), or add per-tag / per-level overrides under Set Up → Credit Card on each fee.| 📘 Help Manual | Credit Card Fees and Cash Discounts |
| ⚡ Speed | ⭐⭐⭐⭐ |
| 💰 Revenue | ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ |
| 🎯 Ease of Use | ⭐⭐⭐⭐ |
💳 Credit-Card Surcharge Setup Is Now One Switch
One toggle, one percentage, one signature — instead of four separate fee entries. Setting up a card surcharge used to mean adding four separate fee entries — one each for in-person, keyed, and the two card-on-file cases — every one with its own owner signature, and you had to type the rate as a decimal like.0285. It was fiddly and easy to get wrong.
Now Set Up → Credit Card has a single Enable Credit Card Surcharge checkbox, one Surcharge % box you fill in like a tax rate (type 2.85 for 2.85%, with a live “= 2.85%” readback right beside it so there’s no decimal guesswork), and one owner signature that covers all four card types at once. The status line under it always tells you in plain words whether the surcharge is on or off and at what rate.
Per-customer and per-membership exemptions moved behind an Advanced — Customer Exemptions button, so the main screen stays clean. Your existing surcharge keeps working exactly as before — nothing at the register changes. You’ll only be asked to sign again if you change the rate, turn the surcharge off and back on, or if your store was set up before signatures were recorded; a no-change save won’t re-prompt.
How to activate: Set Up → Credit Card → Enable Credit Card Surcharge.
| 📘 Help Manual | Credit Card Fees and Cash Discounts |
| ⚡ Speed | ⭐⭐⭐⭐ |
| 💰 Revenue | ⭐⭐⭐ |
| 🎯 Ease of Use | ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ |
🛡 Diagnostics — If TORO Won’t Update or Launch, Click This
17 tests. Two one-click fixes. Plain English answers. No more guessing. If TORO ever fails to update or launch, the updater window now has a big Diagnostics button. Click it and TORO runs 17 tests across your computer, your internet connection, TORO’s servers, and your databases — then tells you in plain English what’s working and what’s not. No technical jargon, no log files to email, no support call to start. Two one-click fixes are built in:- Fix DNS Problems — a common reason TORO can’t reach its servers is that the store’s router is handing out a broken DNS server. One click switches your computer to Google’s public DNS and tries again. There’s a Restore button to undo if you ever need to.
- Email Logs to Support — if the diagnostic spots a problem you can’t fix yourself, one click ships the entire log straight to our support team so we can dig in without the back-and-forth.
| ⚡ Speed | ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ |
| 💰 Revenue | ⭐⭐⭐ |
| 🎯 Ease of Use | ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ |
📦 Purchase Orders & Vendor Tools Got a Tune-Up
Less fighting the order screen, faster finding a supplier, and prices that finally tell you what they mean. A cluster of fixes and small upgrades make ordering and managing vendors smoother:- Adding an item bumps the quantity again. “Add Item” (and barcode scan) on a purchase order had started dropping a brand-new line every time, even when that item was already on the order — you had to hand-merge them. It now just increases the existing line’s quantity, the way it used to. (“Add Item As New Line” still forces a separate line on purpose.)
- Search box on Vendor Management. Start typing and the vendor list filters to matching names as you go — no more scrolling a long list to find one supplier. Works right alongside the “Show active only” checkbox.
- Contract pricing shows the real percentage. On vendor and wholesale-account contract pricing, a live label now spells out exactly what you typed — “This = −10%” — and turns red and warns you when the sign is backwards (a positive markup on a purchase order, or a below-cost price on a wholesale account). No more accidental −1,000% from typing “−10” where the system expected a decimal.
- The confusing “MANUAL” status is gone. Orders you marked as already placed elsewhere used to land in a status called MANUAL that didn’t match any button and left everyone guessing. They now simply show as ORDERED, like every other placed order, and a fresh draft correctly shows as PENDING. (Existing MANUAL orders are tidied up to ORDERED automatically.)
- Adding a rep no longer calls them a “loyalty customer.” The Add Representative screen now reads NEW REPRESENTATIVE! and asks for a first name and a valid email, so order notifications actually reach the right person.
- No more “SMS Module is not active” popup when you pick a vendor on a store that doesn’t use SMS — the order flow just continues.
| 📘 Help Manual | Creating a Purchase Order |
| ⚡ Speed | ⭐⭐⭐⭐ |
| 💰 Revenue | ⭐⭐⭐ |
| 🎯 Ease of Use | ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ |
🌐 Try the Online Store Before You Buy It
A built-in setup-and-test screen lets any store connect a website and push a test product in minutes. On a station that doesn’t have the Online Store add-on, the Online Store button now opens a friendly setup-and-test screen for connecting your WordPress / WooCommerce website. Enter your site address and credentials once (TORO remembers them), then upload a test image and push a test product with a single click. An animated progress window keeps you posted, and the finished image and product pages open automatically so you can see it worked. Built-in ? helpers walk you through creating the website password and the store API keys, it warns you if you’ve pasted a login password by mistake, and any failure comes back with a plain-English reason and the exact fix to hand your web person. A Copy Credentials button bundles everything (including the live product link) for support. Stores that already have the Online Store add-on see their normal Online Store screen, unchanged. How to access: Sidebar → Online Store (on a store that hasn’t activated the add-on yet).| 📘 Help Manual | Your Online Store |
| ⚡ Speed | ⭐⭐⭐⭐ |
| 💰 Revenue | ⭐⭐⭐⭐ |
| 🎯 Ease of Use | ⭐⭐⭐⭐ |
📖 Item Catalog — New Name, New Browse Mode, New Look
The sidebar tab formerly known as “Find Item” is now “Item Catalog,” and you can browse by company. The sidebar tab has been renamed from Find Item to Item Catalog — because that’s actually what it does. You don’t go there to find one item; you go there to browse what you carry. The name now matches the job. Up top, you’ll see a new BRAND / COMPANY toggle:- BRAND mode is the classic flow you’re used to — pick a brand, see its items.
- COMPANY mode lets you pick a vendor (Altadis, Davidoff, Drew Estate, etc.) and see every item across every brand that company makes — one combined list. Great for buyers who think in companies rather than brands.
5 ½, 5 ⅝, 6 instead of 5.5, 5.625, 6.0. Imprecise numbers from old imports get smoothed to the nearest standard fraction. The vertical scrollbar is now a proper half-inch wide bar with a thumb that stays at least 80 pixels tall — finally grabbable on a touch screen, no matter how long the list. And the Create New Item button got bigger and bolder so it’s easier to hit.
How to access: Sidebar → Item Catalog. Toggle BRAND / COMPANY at the top.
| ⚡ Speed | ⭐⭐⭐⭐ |
| 💰 Revenue | ⭐⭐⭐ |
| 🎯 Ease of Use | ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ |
📍 Customize the Modern Main Screen
Lock the sidebar open. Resize the clock. Show a 21-and-up cutoff date. Make it feel like yours. The new main screen learned a handful of customization tricks. Three of the bigger ones: Lock the sidebar — your way — tired of the sidebar popping in and out as you move your mouse? There’s now a little padlock button right on the sidebar (just above the tool icons) that cycles through three modes with a tap: Auto (the default — stays narrow, pops open on hover), Locked Open (always full-width with a label next to every icon), and Locked Collapsed (always narrow, icons only, never pops out). When it’s collapsed, just hover an icon and a tooltip tells you what it does. The same three choices live in the Config menu if you’d rather pick from there. Saved per station, so each terminal can be set up its own way. Billy Upgrade — resize the clock and weather — click the time on the header, and a little− / + dial pops up. Bump the clock font up to about an inch tall. Same for the weather chip — click it to size the temperature and humidity independently. Both sizes are store-wide (every station shows the same size), so the clock you can read from across the room shows up everywhere.
The 21 → date chip — open Config → Show 21 Cutoff Date and a small label appears under the clock showing today’s 21-year cutoff date (e.g. 21 → 04-29-05). Anyone born on or before that date is 21+ today — so when an ID comes across the counter, glance at the chip and you know in a second. Click the chip to resize it like the clock and weather.
How to access: Modern main screen — tap the padlock on the sidebar to change how it locks, use the Config menu (top-left), or click the time / weather / 21-chip directly to resize.
| ⚡ Speed | ⭐⭐⭐⭐ |
| 💰 Revenue | ⭐⭐ |
| 🎯 Ease of Use | ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ |
⚡ One Match? TORO Rings It Up
Search the sale screen, get exactly one result, and skip straight to adding it. When an item search on the sale screen turns up exactly one result, TORO now asks “Only one item matched — add it to the sale?” and drops it in the cart on Yes. Prefer no prompt at all? Set Up → Transactions, Tabs, Tips & Items has a new checkbox to add the single match automatically with no popup. Scanned barcodes still add instantly, exactly as before. How to access: Just search as usual. To skip the prompt: Set Up → Transactions, Tabs, Tips & Items.| ⚡ Speed | ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ |
| 💰 Revenue | ⭐⭐ |
| 🎯 Ease of Use | ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ |
👤 Items Table Size Is Now Per Employee
Each cashier picks their own preferred size. TORO remembers. The big LARGE button on the items panel is back — and now it saves to the cashier’s own profile instead of the station’s. Click it once, TORO prompts for a login, and that cashier’s preference is locked in. Next time they log in, items render large automatically. When they log out, the display goes back to the owner’s default. A matching Config → Font Size menu is a second path to the same setting. So the cashier with younger eyes gets the dense view; the cashier who likes a bigger view gets a bigger view; and nobody has to keep flipping the toggle when shifts change. How to access: Click the LARGE button on the items table, or Config → Font Size.| ⚡ Speed | ⭐⭐⭐ |
| 💰 Revenue | ⭐⭐ |
| 🎯 Ease of Use | ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ |
📊 Double-Click a Product Type to Drill In
One click takes the View Sales report from “all categories” to one category, filtered. On the View Sales report, the By Product Type tab now has a yellow tip at the top — double-click any row to jump straight to the By Item tab, filtered to just that product type. Double-click the Total row to clear the filter and see everything again. The By Product Type tab itself always shows every product type now, even when the Item tab is filtered to one. So you can pivot freely between categories without having to clear the filter by hand each time. How to access: ARM → Sales → By Brand & Item → By Product Type tab.| ⚡ Speed | ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ |
| 💰 Revenue | ⭐⭐⭐ |
| 🎯 Ease of Use | ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ |
🔎 Cigar Finder Is One Click Away on the Customer Lookup
No more drilling through Favorites first. The Account Finder’s Quick Reports panel has a new top button: Cigar Finder. It opens straight into the recommendation tool with that customer already loaded — perfect for the “help them pick something new” conversation that starts at the counter and ends with a sale. The Punchcard panel was trimmed slightly to make room. Same Quick Reports panel, one new button, one fewer click to get into the recommendation flow. How to access: Open a customer in the Account Finder → Cigar Finder button (Quick Reports panel, top).| 📘 Help Manual | TORO Cigar Finder |
| ⚡ Speed | ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ |
| 💰 Revenue | ⭐⭐⭐⭐ |
| 🎯 Ease of Use | ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ |
🛒 More Room for the Cart, Less for the Payments List
The transaction screen rebalanced for what you actually look at. On the modern transaction screen, the payments table is now fixed at about a row and a half tall — enough to peek at the most recent payment at a glance, scroll inside if there are more — and that freed-up space goes to the items list above it. So you see more cart lines before you have to scroll. Subtotal / Tax / Discount / Due labels now sit right next to their numbers on the right side instead of stretching across the whole column. Tighter, easier to read.| ⚡ Speed | ⭐⭐⭐⭐ |
| 💰 Revenue | ⭐⭐ |
| 🎯 Ease of Use | ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ |
🔢 Faster New-Item Entry — Tap to Pick a Cigar’s Size
Pick the length with buttons, set the ring gauge, and stop answering the product-type question every time. Creating a cigar in Quick Add New Items now pops a touch-friendly Size screen: tap a whole-inch button (3, 4, 5, 6, 7) and a fraction button in eighth-inch steps (0, ⅛, ¼ … ⅞) to build the length — or just type the decimal yourself — then enter the ring gauge. No more squinting at a tiny field trying to thumb in “5.625.” New items also stop asking you to choose a product type on every single one. They’re created as a store-wide default (Cigar out of the box), shown right at the top of the screen with a small * button to change the default whenever you want. And every cigar’s detail panel now has an Adjust Size button showing the current size (like5 ½ x 50) — tap it to reopen that same size screen any time you need to fix it.
How to access: Sidebar → Item Catalog → Create New Item (Quick Add). Change the default type with the * button; fix a size later with Adjust Size.
| ⚡ Speed | ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ |
| 💰 Revenue | ⭐⭐ |
| 🎯 Ease of Use | ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ |
🕛 Setting Store Hours Is Faster — Tap the Time Instead of Spinning It
A modern time picker with 15-minute steps, plus a guard against impossible hours. The Set Store Hours screen (and Special Store Hours) now use TORO’s modern time picker. Tap an open or close button and pick the hour, minute, and AM/PM from big on-screen buttons — with minutes locked to 15-minute steps (00, 15, 30, 45) so you’re not nudging a spinner one minute at a time to get to 5:30. TORO now also stops you from saving a day where the open and close times are identical, or where only one of the two is filled in — with a friendly reminder that overnight hours are perfectly fine (for a 2:00 AM close, just set the close time to 2:00 AM). And a crash is fixed: a store that had accidentally saved matching open/close times could previously no longer reopen the Store Hours screen to fix them. How to access: Set Up → Store Hours (and the + / edit buttons for Special Store Hours).| ⚡ Speed | ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ |
| 💰 Revenue | ⭐ |
| 🎯 Ease of Use | ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ |
🔑 TORO Insight Setup Spells Out the Password Rules
A live checklist that turns green as you type — and an eye to see what you typed. When you create your TORO Insight login, the password box now shows a live checklist of the requirements — 10+ characters, an uppercase letter, a lowercase letter, a number, a symbol, and “not your username” — and each line turns green the moment you satisfy it. A matching “passwords match” check sits under the confirm box. No more submitting and getting bounced back with a vague rejection. Each password field also has a small eye toggle on the right that reveals what you’ve typed, so you can catch a typo before you submit. How to access: TORO Insight setup → Create Account.| ⚡ Speed | ⭐⭐⭐⭐ |
| 💰 Revenue | ⭐ |
| 🎯 Ease of Use | ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ |
🛠 Under the Hood
- No more scary Java error messages from the updater. If the updater hit a problem reaching TORO’s servers, it used to dump a wall of technical text on screen. Now you get a plain-English message pointing at the new Diagnostics button, and the technical detail goes to the log where support can read it.
- Backing out of a sale no longer leaves TORO “stuck in a transaction.” Tapping Start Transaction and then escaping out — at the password prompt, the customer picker, or the ID/birthday scan — used to leave the system thinking a sale was still in progress, so Close Drawer refused to work. TORO now only counts you as “in a transaction” once you’ve cleared every step and the items screen is actually open.
- The Daily Report window shows every total again. If you’d trimmed your texted/emailed daily digest down to keep it short, the matching cells in the on-screen Daily Report had started showing
$0.00. The Daily Report window now always fills in every figure, no matter how your digest is set. - Texted receipts won’t fire by accident. For customers who’ve never chosen one way or the other, the text-message receipt option now starts switched off — so an accidental tap on the complete button no longer sends a receipt text nobody asked for. Customers who’ve opted into texted receipts still get them.
- The “SMS Module Not Set Up” banner is gone for stores that don’t use SMS. That warning chip at the top of the main screen no longer shows up unless the store has actually turned on the SMS module.
- Scheduled reports arrive at closing time, not the next morning. The daily ARM report (a close-of-business report) had been landing a couple of hours after you opened the next day, because the computer was off overnight. It’s now sent when you close the drawer for the day, with a safety net that catches it on the next launch if a close ever gets missed — and weekly, monthly, and yearly reports now wait for the full period to finish too.
- Prices on the sale screen update the moment you change them. Edit an item’s retail price and ring it up right away — the sale screen now shows the new price immediately instead of the old one.
- Online store: cigar details are back on separate lines. When TORO syncs a product to your website, Country of Origin, Wrapper, Binder, and Filler had started running together into one blob in the description. Each is back on its own line.
- Clearer reasons when a product image won’t upload. Instead of always guessing “image might be too large,” TORO now reports the actual cause — the site couldn’t be reached, the login was rejected, the file really was too big — with a specific fix you can forward to your web host.
- Smoother first install. A brand-new store now comes up live the moment its license key is activated, instead of waiting on a “contact support” approval. Fresh installs point at their own database out of the box, and a new station no longer assumes a receipt-printer cash drawer — you pick your actual drawer type in Set Up Station Information, so the register doesn’t look broken on day one.
- Touch-screen text sizes fixed in three spots. The Potential Customers list in the SMS account finder, the tab picker list, and the items list in the middle column had all been rendering with too-small text or cramped rows after a recent visual refresh. They’re back at their intended sizes.
- No more phantom navigation on the modern main screen. While in a new sale, clicking near the top of the screen could silently jump you to Open Tabs, Online Store, or Item Catalog — where the old top tab strip used to live. Those phantom clicks are now ignored; only the sidebar navigates.
- Sidebar menus stay open while you navigate. On the modern main screen, the pop-out menus (Customer, Manager, Admin, and This Transaction) used to snap shut the moment your mouse drifted off them — so sliding diagonally toward a sub-item could collapse the whole sidebar mid-move. Now they stay open until you click somewhere else, and you can glide across to a sub-menu without it disappearing on you.
- Scanned age check stays put. On an ID-required sale, re-opening the customer no longer wipes the 21-and-up badge you already scanned — it stays on screen.
- Item Catalog scrollbar matches everywhere else. The same fat, grabbable scrollbar from the Item Catalog now flows through to every Toro-themed scrollbar in the app — same touch target, same minimum thumb height, same look.
- Sidebar layout adapts when locked open. When the sidebar is locked open, the items table keeps its Price column the same width but smartly splits the Size column into two centered lines (length on top, ring gauge below) so the item name has more room. Brand tile pages drop from 4 across to 3 across — same button size, just fewer per row to keep the layout balanced.
- Diagnostics works in any language and any region. The diagnostic checks use modern Windows commands so they work on every supported version of Windows, in every locale — no more “works on my English machine but breaks on the Spanish-language one.”
- The cash drawer is more reliable — and heals itself. A USB cash drawer that got unplugged and replugged (or briefly lost power) could put TORO into a frantic reconnect loop that eventually crashed the register. That’s fixed. On top of that, if the drawer ever wedges, TORO can now quietly reset the USB connection on its own and pop a small non-blocking notice — instead of needing a full restart of the computer.
- Insight Control Panel fits on screen again. The Insight hub (“Access TORO from your phone”) had started stacking its cards in a single column, shoving the right-hand cards (Data Feed, Nightly Inventory, Push Settings, User Access, Portal) off the edge with descriptions cut off mid-sentence. It’s back to an even two-column layout that fits without scrolling on a normal screen.
- Bulk-download several brands at once from the master catalog. In the Master Brand Bulk Download Tool, holding CTRL to highlight more than one brand used to queue only the first. Now every brand you select is added to the download, a yellow hint reminds you that CTRL multi-selects, and if one brand can’t be queued the rest still go through.
- The updater installs TORO under its real name now. A handful of stations had been ending up with the program installed (and running) under the old internal name — so the desktop shortcut, the running process, and any saved file paths all referred to a name nobody at the counter would recognize. The updater now always installs and launches TORO under its canonical name, quietly fixes any drifted station the next time it updates, and sweeps stale legacy shortcuts off both the user’s and the public desktop on both the next TORO launch and the next update.
- The registered store Owner is now locked down. Only TORO Support can change who the registered Owner of a store is — even the current Owner can no longer reassign it from the Set Up screen. If a station ever boots without a known Owner, it no longer drops the next person at the keyboard into a setup form; it simply refuses to start and shows a clear message to call Support (error code
OWNER-208). Every Owner change is now also recorded in the log with the previous Owner, the new Owner, and who triggered it — so an accidental change can be traced and reversed.