Expiry Dates and Gift Cards or Loyalty Points

I need to consider how to handle Gift Cards that Expire or Credit applied that will Expire. I have referenced the following links:

Other links exist but they came from me :neutral_face: so no need to post. It seems this has not been resolved in V4 or V5 so I would like to get some ideas on how to solve this please.

Back Ground
In some Clubs I deal with they issue a Voucher for prize winning with an expiry date from 30 days, 90 days and sometimes a Year (Financial Year as determined by Accounting Year of Club). Therefore at some process point the Unused Value of the Voucher needs to be wiped when the Expiry Date passes.

I have implemented a Prize Ledger before and the difficult parts are Allocation of Value, Running Balance, Credit Redemption (wipes).

My initial thoughts was to create a new Entity Type - Prize Ledger but this infers individual records with various expiry dates and running balances. Using a Gift Card encapsulates expiry date, value and running balance in one Entity but the Clubs will issue 250+ Vouchers each week creating over time a very large Card Table!

The concepts can be expanded to Loyalty Points just as airlines will vanish your points if you do not travel with them enough.

Can I have other ideas and some techniques on solving this problem, thanks.

So the basic need is to allow the points to be wiped after specific time period has passed? The card itself may not expire but the points would? Is that correct?

Yes points OR value (value = $$).

A Customer may earn multiple prizes during his membership term of typically 10 - 20 years.

Thinking about the various tools available this shouldnt be too hard. I have a couple questions.

  1. Do you have current cards already distributed that you want this to be active for? Would we need to retro the dates?
  2. Do you want points to slowly drop off or just wipe off completely after specific time?

Ok so your saying a customer may win 1.00 on the 9th and then on the 11th win 2.00 if not used points expire after 30 days… so 30 days from the 9th 1.oo drops off but the 2.00 still there. Then 30 days from the 11th the 2.00 drop off ending with zero balance?

Is that similar?

Yes to both. I have a database with $100K value stored. I would need to convert this over but I can do using SQL the main issue id adding and controlling new prize allocations.

Yes that is correct.

Some Clubs do all of the above and also will wipe at the end off the Accounting Year everything not used including a prize allocated 2 days prior will be wiped.

EDIT: Its 11.49pm so off to get some sleep, excuse me if I do not answer straight away :sleeping:

I will need some time but I am willing to help you sort this out. I do not see why we cant do this.

No problems @kendash - I am working through lots of other stuff so we have time. If we are successful this may resolve 1 (or all) of the multiple accounts for a customer.

My initial thoughts are that the Automation and SQL required to implement this will teach me heaps about SambaPOS. Also I think GiftCards are just another Entity Type (I think) so if we can work out some automation to attach a Gift Card Account to a Customer automatically - this can be applied to my other account requirements…. :wink:

The use of Member No. will be a “custom field” applied across all Entity Types i.e. Gift Cards, House Levy…
Idea is to pick an Entity and through automation any Entity Types with the same Member No. are retrieved to the “Payments Screen” - (I guess you guys call this attached to a ticket?). An original thought by our Mr @QMcKay :smile: back in November '14.

Just not sure about how the accounting (Accounts) will turn out :neutral_face:
PS: Gift Cards can be recharged right?

Well we have a couple new things we can work with. Task types are awesome and may be useful. Of course the API and scripting is an option as well. Or perhaps even a combination of it all.

Emre asked us to really start focusing on task types he saw tremendous potential and I can say after messing with them I’m on board. We can pretty much create our own database table structure with them to store and retrieve anything we want.

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@pauln Did you achieved this yet? as iam looking for the same since long time tutorial would be so helpful thank you.

Hey @gsreddy no I have not gone further with Expiry Dates as back then was waiting for some ideas from kendash. Know much more about Samba now and probably not use Samba Accounting Documents for this.

May need to revisit in the future when I have more time…

How about this? Ive just been asked if there is a way to have a membership Expiry… so, customer pays for 1 years membership which gives them VIP discounts, and after 12 months it expires? maybe gives a pop up telling of the expiry?

Matt

Yes not a lot has been done with Dates & Expiry from what I can gather. I have asked about before and I think kendash was heading done the Task Widget path but never started.

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is there any advances in this? Id like the VIP Level to be removed 12 months from when an account is opened.

Customers pay for 12 month membership, which uses my VIP tutorial and gives them a VIP Level in custom fields. Id like that field wiped after 12 months.

I cant even begin to think what actions would be needed for this

I can make it so that a membership start date is entered, so can it add an expiry automatically? then maybe a task action that looks for that day and clears custom data?

None from me as yet :disappointed: but you requirements are much more simple than mine.

You need to dig up as much DATE handling techniques as possible and then apply these to a Custom Field on Entity. One you can Test Expiry of a date the rest is sitting back and designing the process.

First Thoughts:
Trigger each day to test Expiry.
Report on Entity to test Expiry and Filter by.
A Screen Widget filtering Customer by Expiry with Actions to remove VIP Status.
A Script to select all Customers that have Expired VIP Status to an ARRAY and process each line to remove VIP Status.

EDIT:
A Trigger to run a Script would be the easiest and most compact: 1 script and 1 trigger. The hard bit is the JSON stuff with the Expiry Date as a Custom Field.

My needs are a bit complicated: I need an Expiry on Credits paid on Customer Account so each Credit Payment may have a difference Expiry Date :confounded: I guess it would be Many Gift Cards attached to a Customer :confused:

yours is the same… you remove the credit? whereas mine removed the VIP level?

Not really, I wish. You have 1 Entity with 1 Custom Field.
I have 1 Entity, no custom field BUT lots of Account Payments with some sort of Note containing a Expiry Date OR as above many Gift Cards attached to 1 Entity.

I guess if I could work out how to attached many Gift Cards and that would be practical I could look into it. Unfortunately looking at 1 Entity they would have 1,000 Gift Card Entries alone. AND we cannot remove entities or accounts histories…

ah gotcha

Well… ill open a seperate thread then in the hope one of the POS legends can help :slight_smile: