A loyalty balance is a promise, not a feature

Bookka Rewards is built into the product rather than bolted on as an add-on, and it works the way the punch card in your drawer never quite did.

You pick how it earns — points per dollar spent, or a stamp card where each visit is worth one stamp. You name the points, set the earn rate, a minimum spend, a daily earn cap and an expiry if you want one, and you define the rewards yourself. Customers earn in all three places money changes hands: an online booking, a sale at the counter, an order from your online shop. They redeem against a booking or in person.

That is the feature. The rest of this is about the rules underneath it, because a points balance is real value and the rules are what make it worth anything.

The points outlive the programme

The decision that shaped everything else: points already earned survive the programme being switched off.

A programme can stop two ways — you turn it off, or your account drops to the Free plan. In both cases nobody earns anything new from that moment. But every balance already out there stays redeemable, and stays redeemable from every booking entry point, exactly as before.

Your customers gave you their money partly on the understanding that those points meant something. Withdrawing them afterwards isn’t a feature toggle — it’s taking back something you already sold. It’s the same reason a Bookka gift card stays alive when a business downgrades.

The customer’s wallet also tells them whether earning is currently live, rather than showing a number that has quietly stopped moving: *your 340 points still work here, you’re just not earning new ones.* A balance you can’t explain is worse than no balance at all.

Value earns once, when it’s spent

Gift cards and loyalty interact in a way that isn’t obvious until you draw it out. A gift card is money moving twice — once when it’s bought, once when it’s used — but it’s the same money. If it earned points on both, you would be paying out twice on a single sale.

So on Bookka a gift card earns when it is spent, not when it is bought. That rule holds all the way through, including the per-visit bonus: no eligible spend means no points of any kind. It sounds like a detail. It’s the difference between a loyalty programme that costs what you think it costs and one that quietly doesn’t.

The ledger is the truth

Every movement of points — earning, redeeming, expiring, a manual adjustment — is written as an entry in one append-only ledger, through one piece of code. Nothing anywhere else is allowed to move a balance.

That constraint costs something to maintain and it is worth every bit of it, because a balance is then not a number somebody typed. It is the sum of its own history, and it can always be checked against that history and put right. A points system where the balance is the only record of itself has no way to answer the one question that matters when a customer disagrees with it: how did we get here?

The quieter guarantees

• An abandoned checkout doesn’t cost a customer their points. Points reserved against a sale that never completes are returned, and the discount is unwound with them.
• Reward discounts aren’t counted as revenue. Treating a discount as income inflates every report you would use to make a decision.
• A booking paid entirely with a reward can still be cancelled and refunded, and doesn’t leave an empty $0 invoice in your accounting.
• Rewards work at wound-down businesses, because those balances are still promises.

Why bother with any of it

Retention is unglamorous next to winning new customers, and it’s where the money is. Someone who already knows where you are and liked what you did costs nothing to bring back. A points balance is a small, concrete reason to pick you over the shop down the road on a day when either would do.

Bookka Rewards is included on Business and Executive — see pricing, or the changelog for what we’ve shipped since.