Employee Discounts

Where to find it: Open the Dashboard, click the Employees tab on the left, and click the Employee Points card. (Can't find it? Type "points" in the search box at the top right.) That opens a menu with everything to do with staff points on it — the rules below live under Points Settings. (It's part of the Payroll Module.)

Most shops want to take care of their staff, but "take care of" can quietly turn into "give away the store." TORO's Employee Discounts program is built to keep that generous instinct on a leash. Your team earns points for the hours they actually work, and those points buy them a real discount on the product you choose — at the price you decide. It's a perk that rewards showing up, not just being on the payroll.

A quick note before we dig in, because two things sound alike: Employee Comp is the on-the-spot "shift smoke" you ring up against a daily dollar allowance. Employee Discounts — this article — is the points-based program where staff bank points by working and later spend them on discounted purchases. Different tools, different jobs. (If Comp is what you're after, that's covered in Applying Discounts and Coupons.)

How the Whole Thing Works

The program has two halves that meet in the middle:

Employees earn points every time they clock out — a set number of points per hour worked.
Points buy discounts you've pre-built. Each discount you create has a price (cost, a flat price, or a percentage off) and a points cost to redeem it.

So a part-timer who works a couple of shifts has enough points for a single stick at a nice discount. A full-timer who's there every day banks more and can treat themselves more often. The hours do the gating, automatically.

The setup screen is four rule boxes across the top and three discount tables below. Each rule box reads as a plain sentence with the numbers you can change sitting right in it. Let's walk through them.

Setting the Point Rules

Earning Points is where you decide how fast points pile up.

"The employee earns ___ points per hour worked, up to ___ points." The first number is the rate — 1 point per hour is a clean starting place.
The second number is the ceiling. Points stop building once they hit it, so nobody hoards a year's worth and walks out with a humidor. When someone clocks out at the cap, TORO tells them they're maxed and nudges them to go enjoy a cigar. Banked points don't expire — they only go away when an employee spends them. And if you lower the cap later, you won't erase points anyone's already earned; they simply stop earning more until they've spent back down under the new ceiling.

Clocked-In Hours Needed decides who's actually allowed to spend points.

"They must work ___ hours in the last ___ days to use points." This is the anti-freeloader rule. Someone who clocked a single hour last month shouldn't be cashing in — set a real threshold (say, 20 hours in the last 30 days) and TORO blocks redemption until they've put in the time. Brand-new hires get a fair shake: if they haven't been around long enough to hit the window yet, TORO checks whether their pace is on track instead. (For this to work, each employee needs an Employee Start Date set on their account — TORO will remind you if it's missing.)

Stopping Abuse keeps the same cigar from being redeemed over and over.

Choose Allow or Do not allow "buying the same cigar again within ___ days." Handy when you don't want someone redeeming the identical premium stick every single shift.

Reviews lets you ask for something back.

"Require a review before using points again: Yes/No with at least ___ characters." Turn it to Yes and employees have to write a short review of what they redeemed before they can redeem again. The character minimum is so "good" doesn't count as a review. It's an easy way to build up real staff notes on your inventory.

Whatever you change in these boxes, hit Save to lock it in. (Pressing Enter won't save — use the button.)

Building the Discounts

Below the rules are three tables — By Product Type, By Brand, and By Item. Each works the same way, with three buttons underneath it: Add, Edit, and Remove. (Double-clicking a row opens it for editing too.)

Pick the table that matches how broad you want the deal to be. A Product Type discount covers everything in that category (all cigars, all accessories). A Brand discount covers one brand's whole lineup. An Item discount is one specific SKU. Use the narrowest table that does the job, and try not to build rules that overlap each other. When they do overlap, TORO resolves them in a fixed order: a specific Item discount wins first, then a Brand discount, and a Product Type discount is the fallback. So if you put both a Brand rule and an Item rule on the same product, the Item rule is what applies.

When you add or edit a discount, you'll set:

Discount Type — how the price is figured:

Cost — the employee pays your actual cost on the item. No amount needed; TORO pulls the cost automatically.
Set Unit Price — you name an exact price (e.g., $5.00 flat).
Percentage — a percentage off retail.

Amount — what the Discount Type needs. For Set Unit Price it's the dollar price. For Percentage, enter it as a decimal and watch the live preview right next to the field — it translates what you type into a real percentage so you catch a slip before it bites. Type 0.15 for 15% off, 0.25 for 25% — not 15, which the preview will flag as a wild number. For Cost, leave it alone.

Points Required — how many points the employee spends to claim this discount. This is your real lever. A cheap bundle cigar might cost 1 point; a premium box-press might cost 5. Pricier perks, more points.

Min Retail / Max Retail (Product Type and Brand only) — a price band. Because "all cigars" spans a $4 stick and a $40 stick, you can create tiers: maybe cigars from $0–$10 cost 1 point, and $10.01–$25 cost 2 points. Just add one row per band. TORO checks an item's retail against these ranges to find the matching discount.

One rule TORO enforces here: your price bands can't leave a gap. If you set one band ending at $10.00, the next has to pick up at $10.01. If there's a hole — say one band stops at $10 and the next starts at $15 — TORO won't let you save and will tell you exactly where the gap is. This guarantees every item lands in a band.

Telling Staff What to Try

There's a second, optional half to this program: you can hand an employee a list of cigars you want them to smoke, in an order you choose. Open it with the Required Cigars To Smoke button at the bottom-left of the Employee Discounts & Points screen.

Pick an employee from the EMPLOYEE list at the top and their list appears. From the panels on the right you can:

Scan a barcode or use Find a Cigar to Add to put a cigar on that person's list. TORO asks for a priority number each time.
Add to Every Employee puts the same cigar on everyone's list at once — good for a new line you want the whole floor to know.
Cigars We Need to Move answers "what should they be smoking?" for you. It opens a list of every in-stock cigar that's either overstocked or hasn't sold in the last 12 months — the same math the Analytic Selling Assistant uses — worst first, with how many you have, how many sold, days of supply at the current pace, and what the Selling Assistant recommends doing about it. Pick one, set a priority, and it lands on the selected employee's list (or everyone's, if All Users is picked up top). The idea: get your team smoking — and recommending — the inventory that's stuck on the shelf, instead of the stuff that already sells itself.
With a row selected: Change Priority, Read Their Review, View Transaction, or Remove From List.

Priority is the running order. Everything at priority 1 has to be bought before anything at priority 2 unlocks, and an employee can't go pick their own cigar until the assigned list is empty. Leave the list alone entirely and staff simply choose freely — most shops run it that way.

The Reports

Points Reports on the Employee Points menu gathers the three Advanced Reporting Module reports that deal with staff: Employee Purchase Cigars (every cigar bought with points), Employee Purchases (anything an employee rang up for themselves during a shift) and Discounts (every discount given, by employee). If you're not on the Advanced Reporting Module you can still open the window and see what's in it, and subscribe from there.

Does It Actually Work? The Smoke Impact Report

The Smoke Impact Report button at the bottom of the Required Cigars To Smoke screen answers the question every owner eventually asks: when my people smoke a cigar, do they actually sell more of it?

Pick a month and TORO lists every cigar an employee bought with their points that month, comparing how it sold in the 3 months before the smoke against the 3 months after. The employee's own purchase never counts as a sale, so nobody pads their numbers by smoking the inventory. Two views:

By Employee — one row per person: cigars smoked, reviews written, and the overall change in selling pace across everything they tried. This is your "who actually sells what they smoke" ranking.
Each Cigar — every individual smoke with the employee's review rating and that cigar's before/after numbers. NEW in the change column means the cigar wasn't selling at all before someone smoked it.

Cigars smoked recently show how many days TORO has been able to track so far, and the comparison uses per-day pace, so a cigar smoked three weeks ago is measured fairly against one smoked last year.

Seeing Where Everyone Stands, and Handing Out Bonus Points

From the Employee Points menu, Point History shows your whole team on one screen: how many points each person has to spend right now, how much they've earned from shifts, any bonus points you've given them, and how many cigars they've smoked on points.

Tap anyone to open their own record — every shift they worked and what it earned, every bonus you gave them and why, and every cigar they smoked with what they paid for it. You can narrow it to just shifts, just bonuses or just cigars, and choose how far back to look.

Giving someone bonus points

Staff earn points automatically by working, but sometimes you just want to say thank you — or fix a shift somebody forgot to clock out of. Select the person, tap Give Bonus Points, and enter an amount and a reason.

The reason isn't optional, and that's deliberate: it shows up on that employee's history, so anybody looking later can see where the points came from and who gave them. There are +1, +5 and +10 buttons so you don't have to hunt for a keyboard.

If the amount would push someone past the maximum you set under Points Settings, TORO will tell you before you commit. You're still allowed to do it — it just means they won't earn any more from shifts until they've spent back down.

One number that surprises people: Earned From Shifts and Bonus Points Given are lifetime totals, while Points Available is what they can spend today. They won't subtract to each other, and that's normal — cigars bought before mid-2026 were recorded differently. The screen says so underneath the totals.

What Your Employees See

On the redemption side, the employee rings up their pick from the register's Employee menu → Purchase an Item with Employee Points. (They have to be clocked in, logged in as themselves, and not in the middle of a sale.)

That opens Employee Cigar Points, and the first thing on it is their balance in big numbers, with the earn rate underneath. Next to it, a What You'll Pay box spells out the deal you built — for example "$0.00 – $40.00 → you pay $0.02, costs 0 points" — so they know the damage before anything else opens.

What fills the middle depends on whether you've assigned them anything:

Nothing assigned (the usual case) — one big Pick a Cigar From the Store button. It opens the item finder, they choose, and they pay on the next screen.
You've assigned cigars — each one shows as a card with a NEXT UP or LOCKED badge, what they'll pay, the points it costs, and its own Buy This One button. LOCKED cards say why: the lower priority numbers have to be cleared first. Picking their own is unavailable until the assigned list is empty, and the button says so rather than just sitting greyed out.

Either way they finish on the normal payment screen. If your store rounds cash change up to the nearest nickel, that now happens here too — staff purchases used to be the one cash sale that still came back with pennies. The few cents go onto that employee's own virtual gift card, not the charity account customer change goes to, so it builds up as credit toward their next pick. They aren't asked anything; the amount due simply lands on a nickel. It's cash only — there's no change to round on a card or a gift certificate — and if you don't round change, nothing about this screen changes.

If they haven't worked enough hours, or they owe reviews, the balance switches to POINTS PAUSED and a message explains which it is and what to do about it. And if they're trying to re-claim something they bought too recently, the abuse rule steps in.

There's no separate manager screen for point balances — each employee sees their own total right there when they go to redeem. Their purchase history and the reviews they owe live one click away, behind the My Cigars & Reviews button at the bottom of that screen.

The point of all of it: the perk runs itself. You set the rules once, and TORO handles the earning, the eligibility, and the guardrails so you don't have to police it shift by shift.