Reward points in Tiram: how to set up earning, redemption, and expiry for customer loyalty

Most Indian shops already run informal loyalty — a punch card, a notebook line, or a verbal promise (‘your 10th kg is free’). It works until the shop owner who remembers the promise is busy, on leave, or the notebook goes missing. A repeat customer who isn't tracked consistently eventually stops feeling recognised — and recognition, not just price, is what keeps a shop's regulars coming back over a Tally-only competitor or a supermarket with lower prices but no relationship.

Reward points formalise that recognition without adding counter friction: the system earns and tracks points automatically on every bill, and redemption is a tender type at checkout, not a separate reconciliation exercise.

Reward points are included in Tiram's Gold and Platinum plans. The Silver plan does not include them — the Settings menu simply won't show the Rewards screen on Silver, and the underlying API rejects reward-point reads and writes with a plan-upgrade response rather than a generic error.

This is a plan-tier gate, not a platform gate: it applies identically whether you run Tiram as the cloud SaaS app or the offline Windows/Mac desktop app. If you're on Silver and want reward points, upgrading to Gold also unlocks WhatsApp invoicing and campaigns, multiple warehouses with stock transfers, custom roles, API keys, bulk exports, and a full audit trail — reward points don't ship as a standalone add-on.

From Settings → Rewards — a teammate needs permission to manage rewards settings, which Admins have by default and which you can grant to a custom role — toggle Enable reward points on. Turning it on doesn't retroactively create points for past bills; earning starts from the next invoice or Quick Bill sale onward.

Turning it back off at any time stops new earning and redemption immediately, but existing customer point balances are preserved — nothing is deleted. That makes reward points safe to trial: turn it on, watch a billing cycle, and turn it off without losing any other configuration if it isn't the right fit yet.

Earn rate is the percentage of a bill's value that converts to points — set it to 2% and a ₹1,000 bill earns the customer 20 points. Value per point is what each point is worth when redeemed — at ₹1.00 per point, those 20 points are worth ₹20 off a future bill.

Together the two numbers set your effective loyalty discount rate: a 2% earn rate at ₹1.00 per point returns roughly 2% of spend as future discount, before any redemption caps. Most Indian retail loyalty programs sit between 1% and 5% earn rate; go higher only if your margins can absorb it — reward points are a real liability the moment they're earned, not just a marketing gesture.

Min. balance to redeem stops a customer cashing in a handful of points on their very next visit — set it to 100 and a customer sitting at 40 points has to keep shopping before they can redeem anything. Max redeemable per bill stops the opposite problem: a customer who has hoarded a large balance wiping out an entire sale with points. A 50% cap means at most half of any bill's payable amount can be covered by points; the rest is settled the normal way.

Both caps exist to protect a single bill's cash collection — a shop still needs real cash or UPI in hand to pay its own vendors, even on a bill where a loyal customer redeems generously.

Points expire after is set in days, counted from when each batch of points was earned. Leave it at 0 and points never expire — simplest for customers, but every point ever earned and not yet redeemed stays on your books indefinitely. Set it to, say, 365, and points earned in July 2026 lapse if the customer hasn't redeemed them by July 2027.

There's no universally right answer: a small neighbourhood shop with a stable, walk-in customer base often keeps expiry at 0 for goodwill; a multi-counter business with a larger, more diffuse customer base is more likely to set a 1-year expiry to keep the reward liability bounded and predictable.

At Quick Bill or invoice checkout, a cashier bills a known customer as usual; redeemable points show against that customer's balance, and redemption applies as a payment tender on the post-tax total — the same way cash, UPI, or card do. GST is calculated on the full bill value first; the points tender then settles part of what's owed, subject to the minimum-balance and per-bill cap rules above.

Because redemption is a tender type rather than a manual discount line, it shows up correctly in your daily sales and payment-mode reports — a shop owner can see exactly how much revenue was collected via points on any given day, not just in total.

A paper punch card or a notebook line is the status quo for most Indian small shops today. It works — until the card is lost, the notebook page is illegible, or the one staff member who remembers a regular customer's balance is off for the day. None of it survives a busy Saturday at a second counter.

Tiram's reward points remove the memory dependency: every customer's balance lives on their profile, visible to any staff member at any counter, calculated the same way every time, and redeemed as a normal part of the bill rather than a separate favour the cashier has to remember to apply.