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Food & Beverage Membership

This page is for whoever runs a loyalty programme across a café chain’s outlets. Take a franchise café chain with 30 outlets, most of them franchisee-owned — franchise-model F&B is one of the verified secondary segments BigLedger sells to. The membership machinery is the same as the retail shape — read that page first; this one covers what a café chain adds: a points scheme that is not a price book, receipts from other merchants, and a referral programme.

1. Points at the till, the same way

Members are cards in Membership Admin; the cashier finds them in POS General by phone or card. Points come from a Pricebook POINT treatment on the cash bill lines, awarded when the bill reaches the status the company member-point configuration names — which you must set to the cash-bill document type, because the default is a FINAL sales order.

A café often wants “one point per drink” rather than “one point per ringgit”. A price set can carry an Item Category rule on its Single Line tab for the beverage categories (the counter calculator never reads the Multi Line tab, and the till’s purchase-with-purchase pass, which does, only ever discounts — it awards no points) and a POINT treatment with Operator ABSOLUTE and Value 1, so a latte line earns one point whatever it costs. Nine drinks, nine points; a free-drink reward is then a voucher (below) or a points redemption at the PTS to CCY rate.

What does not exist: a “stamp” currency type with activity-based expiry, a maximum of “27 stamps”, a stamp card that “auto-resets” — a second point currency is just another currency with its own lots and end dates. There is no per-country earning table, no SGD or THB rate on a point currency, no “airport location multiplier” and no time-of-day rule. The counter does not test a company, member label, currency, settlement method or OCR company header rule on the price set (Pricebook Configuration lists the header rules it does test, with dates that must be absolute). Its Single Line rules are item, item type, item category (and categories 1 to 10), and code patterns on the item or its category. A price set with no Single Line rule at all matches no line at the counter — to cover every item, give it an item-code pattern that matches everything, such as .*.

2. Points from a receipt the chain did not issue

A franchisor that wants to reward purchases at franchisee outlets that run their own till — or at partner merchants — uses OCR Cash Bill. The member photographs the receipt in the storefront or in store; AWS Textract extracts it; the server matches the merchant against the applet’s OCR Company master and the lines against its item mapping; a reviewer corrects the mapping, rejects fakes and duplicates and presses FINAL; the membership points processor evaluates the price book named on the OCR job template and writes the point lines. The submission limit per month and the “outdated receipt” window are tenant settings on that page.

Nothing here posts a journal or touches stock: the scanned receipt is held as an OCR document of its own, not a sales document, and the points job writes point lines and nothing else. The OCR Cash Bill troubleshooting table is the one to read before go-live: a FINAL with no enabled subscriber job template produces no points and no error.

3. A referral programme

A café chain that pays existing members for bringing friends uses the MLM Admin Applet with a Commission Scheme of type MLM:

  1. Create a program (code, name, start and end, the commission scheme, the storefront website, and a forwarding URL containing <URL-KEY>). Enrol the first members as participants — each gets an invite URL key and a QR code.
  2. A participant invites a friend. Either the admin creates an invitation (member, entity or entity-contact invitee) and the scheduled invitation run (MLM_INVITATION_LINK_PROCESSOR in the Scheduler applet) sends it through the program’s Unified Contact Center endpoints by SMS, e-mail or WhatsApp and marks it SENT, or the friend scans the QR code, lands on the storefront with the key and registers there. One invitation the run fails to send ends that run, and the invitations after it wait for the next one.
  3. Acceptance — through the invitation link or the storefront’s post-registration step — creates the friend’s customer entity, membership card and participant row and marks the invitation ACCEPTED; the scheduled lineage run (INVITATION_INSERTION_INTO_LINEAGE_PROCESSOR) then writes the lineage row, upline → downline, at level parent + 1 (levels 0 to 10), and marks the invitation LINEAGE_UPDATED. It marks an accepted invitation that is missing a member or an entity the same way without writing its lineage, so after the first run check that every LINEAGE_UPDATED invitation has a lineage row — a friend with no upline earns nobody a commission.
  4. When the friend buys, the Sales Commission posting run finds the MLM scheme, walks the customer’s lineage upward and writes one commission line per upline level with that level’s treatment. The money is paid through the Sales Commission cycle; its report lists Member, MLM Member and MLM Program.

What does not exist: an “override points” engine. Uplines are paid money through the commission run, level by level; the membership-points run gives points only to the member on the sales document, from the scheme’s first treatment, and never reads the lineage. An invitation expires only through the scheduled invitation run: each run marks a created or sent invitation EXPIRED once its expiry date has passed (it stays valid through that whole day) and sends only unexpired ones, and an expired invitation can no longer be accepted. One with no expiry date never expires, and a person can still set the status on the invitation’s edit form.

4. A free-drink voucher

Issue a PRODUCT or SETTLEMENT voucher in Voucher Management with a FIXED quantity, a redemption date range rule and a Member Class rule; assign tickets to members, or let the birthday gift schedule assign them; the barista redeems the serial at POS as a VOUCHER settlement or a line. At FINAL the server marks the ticket redeemed against the bill — only a ticket assigned to the bill’s customer, unless the voucher allows anonymous use, so a free drink assigned to a member is not redeemed on a bill made out to a walk-in. Nothing marks unused tickets EXPIRED when the date range ends; run the expiry-checking call for that.

What the old page had that is not in the product

Stamp currencies with 90-day activity expiry; per-country earning rates; tier qualification by visit count with grace periods; an express-lane and queue-time feature; a mobile app with check-in streaks, badges and 60-second QR refresh; regional server replication and cross-region sync settings; “AI-powered” upsell suggestions at checkout. None of these has a source in the applets or the backend.

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