Points earned at the counter,
spent at the counter.

You set the math, and the form tells you what it costs you.

A loyalty program in UpChannels is four numbers: how much a customer has to spend to earn, how many points that spend earns, what one point is worth in dollars, and when points expire — six months, one year, two years, or never. As you type them, the form computes the reward rate for you and shows it as a percentage back, so you can see that “1 point per $1, worth $0.01 a point” is 1% back before you save anything. It refuses to create a program where the spend, the points or the point value is zero or negative, which is the usual way a rewards scheme quietly starts costing more than it brings in.

You can run more than one program in the same store — a walk-in program and a contractor program, say — and each is named, described, edited, activated and deactivated on its own. Deactivating stops a program from earning without touching anyone's balance, and a program that still has members cannot be deleted at all; the app pushes you to deactivate instead so the points people already hold are never orphaned.

Enrolling a customer takes one field — or one bulk action.

A customer joins from their own record: open the customer, pick a program in the Loyalty Program card, and the membership is created when you save. If you are rolling a program out to a book of business you already have, select customers in the customer list and assign them all at once — the result comes back as a count of how many enrolled and how many failed, so a partial run is visible rather than silent. Staff can also enroll someone mid-sale, because the enrollment control sits in the same order form as the rest of the checkout: the first purchase can be the first points.

The customer's membership card shows the program name, the current points balance, what that balance is worth in dollars, and the earn rate in points per dollar — the three things a cashier is actually asked at the counter. One honest note: a customer belongs to one program at a time in the interface, and moving someone to a different program is deliberately not a cashier-level action.

Points are earned by the order, not by someone remembering.

When an order is created for an enrolled customer, UpChannels writes the earn entry itself. Points are calculated on the order subtotal — after discounts, before tax — less any loyalty credit redeemed on that same order, so tax, shipping and the store's own credit never earn points back on themselves. The order form shows the estimated points for the sale in front of you before you submit it, so the number the customer hears at the counter is the number that posts.

The earn is idempotent per order and program: a double-click, a retry after a dropped connection, or a resubmitted form cannot award the same points twice. Each earn entry records the dollar basis it came from and, when the program expires points, its own expiry date — which is exactly what makes returns and expiration precise later instead of approximate. Lifetime points are tracked separately from the spendable balance, so redeeming does not erase the record of what someone has spent with you.

Redemption is a payment line, so it shows up in the books.

At checkout, staff choose the customer's program and type a dollar amount to redeem. The field is capped at that program's available credit, and a redemption larger than what the customer can actually spend today is refused outright — with the available balance named in the message — rather than quietly rounded down. That refusal is what keeps the stored balance equal to the sum of the ledger.

The credit then posts as a store-credit payment on the order, tagged with the program it came from, and the amount the customer still has to tender drops by exactly that much. It appears in the order's payment ledger and on the printed invoice, which is the difference between a rewards program you can reconcile at the end of the month and one that disappears into a discount field nobody can account for.

Expiration and returns are where points programs go wrong.

Points expire by batch, not by account. Every batch of points carries its own expiry date, redemptions consume the oldest unexpired batch first, and the redeemable balance is what survives after lapsed batches drop out — so a customer who earned across a year spends the points closest to expiring first, without anyone tracking that by hand.

Returns reverse the points the customer actually earned on the original order, prorated by the share of eligible spend coming back — not the points equivalent of the refund at the redemption rate, which on a penny-per-point program would claw back around a hundred points for every dollar returned. Several partial returns against one order are capped cumulatively at what that order earned, and if an order edit removes or reduces the loyalty credit, the redeemed points go back onto the balance exactly once.

Every one of those movements — earn, redemption, return reversal, restore, manual adjustment — is a row in the loyalty ledger carrying the point change, the dollar basis, the order it belongs to, who recorded it and when. The balance and the ledger entry are written in a single transaction, so the two cannot drift apart and a balance from two quarters ago can still be explained line by line.