Loyalty reporting in LS Central: points liability, member activity, and the monthly check

Loyalty & member management · 7 min read

Loyalty points feel like a marketing topic until finance asks a simple question: how much do the points sitting in member accounts right now actually cost us? In LS Central the raw numbers exist — but they are spread across point setup, point entries, point journals, and background jobs, and no single screen hands you the answer. This guide pulls the pieces together: what the liability is, where LS Central keeps each input, and a monthly routine that keeps the figure defensible.

General information only, not accounting advice. How points are provided for in your books is a treatment to agree with your accountant.

What "points liability" means for a store

Points issued but not yet redeemed are a liability of the business that issued them, measured at the expected cost of settling them. That framing creates a familiar tension: marketing tends to see points as a cost when they are redeemed, while an auditor sees them as a liability when they are issued — and the difference shows up at year end. The working formula is straightforward:

• Outstanding points — every point members currently hold.
• × your per-point settlement cost — what one point costs you when a member actually spends it under your program's rules.
• × (1 − expected breakage) — adjusted for the share of points you expect, from your own redemption history, never to be redeemed at all.

LS Central supplies the first number and the structure around it. The second and third are your program's economics — the system records the points; it does not decide what they are worth. Keep that split in mind and the rest of the reporting falls into place.

Where LS Central keeps the loyalty numbers

LS Central's Member Management handles multiple Member Clubs in one company, each with its own rules and setup, for loyalty clubs or staff clubs. Members are registered in a club either directly in the BackOffice or via the Loyalty pack, and each club can have one to many Member Schemes — Standard, Silver, and Gold are the documented example. Points reach a member from three routes, and a monthly report has to account for all three:

• POS Sales — points earned at the till.
• Sales Orders — points earned on orders.
• Member Point Journals — points entered manually. This is the route most likely to surprise you in a totals check.

The setup side lives on the Membership Point Setup page, which is an overview of the total point setup for all clubs, schemes, and accounts. The quickest way in is to search for Membership Point Setup; you can also reach the same setup through the Point Setup action on the Member Club and Member Scheme cards, or via Related – Account – Point Setup on a Member Account.

Two structural facts matter for reporting. First, the documented setup sequence runs club, then schemes, then member accounts, then member contacts, then member points — a common scheme ladder is bronze, silver, gold, and platinum, with most members starting at bronze. Second, more than one member contact can be linked to a single member account (accounts and contacts carry separate number series for exactly this reason), so "member activity" counted per contact and per account will not always match. Decide which one your monthly report counts, and count it the same way every month.

Award Points vs Other Points: the split that changes the report

Not all points in LS Central are the same kind of thing, and adding them together is the most common way a liability figure goes wrong. The Membership Point Setup defines two point types:

Points can also move: they can be transferred from one account to another in the same club, and bought or transferred from other clubs. For reporting, the consequence is simple. Award Points are your sales-driven liability and the only points that move members between schemes. Other Points grew for a different reason, and folding them into the same total hides that. Report the two separately, every month, even if finance later combines them.

One more setup fact worth checking before you trust any per-member number: when the system calculates points it looks first for a point setup for the member account, then for the member scheme, and finally for the member club. A single account-level rule quietly overrides the club rule you thought applied to everyone. Point rules themselves are flexible — points can be earned by sales amount or quantity, by specific tenders, or by specific customers, and the setup's filter types cover Item, Product Group, Item Category, All Items, Special Group, and Tender Type. The Base Calculation on choice (Amount or Quantity) changes what the Unit Rate means, so read a rule's rate alongside its calculation base, never on its own.

The monthly check: a numbered routine

Run this once a month, after the period's statements are posted, and keep the output with the month's close documents (the same discipline as the end-of-day routine, applied monthly):

1. Confirm every club still has a point rule. A calculation rule must exist, with at least one rule per member club. Open Membership Point Setup and scan for clubs, schemes, or accounts whose rules changed since last month — note any Unit Rate or filter changes in the report.
2. Pull outstanding points by club and scheme, split by point type. Award Points and Other Points go in separate columns. This is the base figure for the liability calculation below.
3. Reconcile the month's movement. Points issued from POS sales and sales orders should roughly track sales activity. Points issued through Member Point Journals get their own line — every journal point was a deliberate manual act and should be explainable.
4. Check the expiry job ran. LS Central ships scheduler jobs for this work, including EXP-MEMBER-POINTS (Expire Member Point Entries). Confirm it ran in the period and spot-check a small sample of entries that were due to expire.
5. Check scheme movement ran. The companion job UPGR/DOWNGR-MEMBER handles member upgrades and downgrades (both jobs do the same work as the actions in Member Process Order Entry). Members move between schemes based on calculation rules for issued points, so a month with healthy sales and zero scheme movement is a finding, not a relief.
6. Spot-check point entry dates. Pick several recent point entries and compare their entry date to the POS transaction date. This matters because expiration dates are calculated from the entry date — and LS Central's own release notes record that from v26 the Member Point Entry Date was incorrectly set to the date the Member Utils Job processed the order instead of the POS transaction date, producing incorrect expiration dates, until the field was fixed to use the POS Transaction Date. If your entries show processing dates, your expiry picture is wrong even when the totals look fine.
7. Compute the liability figure and log it next to last month's. A single month's number is trivia; the trend is the report.

What success looks like: issued minus redeemed minus expired equals the change in outstanding points for the month; every club has a current point rule; both scheduler jobs show recent successful runs; sampled entry dates match transaction dates; and the liability total is split Award vs Other with no unexplained journal points. If any one of those fails, the number is not ready for finance.

Turning outstanding points into a liability figure

With clean outstanding totals, the calculation is a worksheet, not a research project. Worked example — substitute your own figures:

Three decision rules keep the worksheet honest. First, run Other Points as a separate worksheet line — they were bought or transferred, and whoever owns that arrangement may treat them differently. Second, re-derive your breakage share from actual redemption history at least yearly; a stale breakage assumption moves the liability more than a month of sales does. Third, if outstanding points jump in a month when sales did not, do not adjust the worksheet — go back to step 3 of the routine. Journals and transfers explain most surprises, and both are documented point routes, not errors by default.

Member activity: what to scan beyond the totals

Liability is the finance view. The operations view is member activity, and LS Central gives you three lenses beyond raw point totals:

• Scheme distribution. Members sit in schemes and move between them as issued points are calculated. A monthly count per scheme (Standard, Silver, Gold — or your bronze-to-platinum ladder) shows whether the program is promoting members or quietly pooling everyone at the bottom tier.
• Offer targeting. Retail Offers and Coupons can be made valid for specific Member Clubs, Member Schemes, and/or Member Attributes. When activity spikes, check which targeted offers were live before crediting (or blaming) the base point rules.
• Discount budgets. A member can carry a discount budget that limits the discount amount they can earn within a given timeframe. Members repeatedly hitting that cap are your most active members by definition — worth a line in the report, and worth knowing before a campaign targets them again.

Member Campaign adds one more: it identifies members through dynamic queries over the member data and connects a campaign to offers and benefits for those members. If a campaign ran in the month, say so in the report — next month's comparison depends on remembering it.

FAQ

Why do two members in the same club earn points at different rates?
Because the rule that applies may not be the club rule. The system looks for a point setup for the member account first, then the scheme, then the club — and rules can differ between clubs and items, and can be based on amount, quantity, tender type, or customer. Check for an account-level setup before assuming a calculation error.

Do bought or transferred points move a member up a scheme?
No. Those are Other Points, and Other Points are not used in upgrade or downgrade calculations. Only Award Points — earned through sales — drive scheme movement.

Why did points expire on the wrong dates?
Expiration dates are calculated from the member point entry date. LS Central's release notes document a period from v26 where that date was set to the processing date instead of the POS transaction date under deferred processing, which produced incorrect expiration dates. If your history spans that behaviour, check your version's release notes before reissuing anything.

Is the worksheet figure the number for our financial statements?
It is the input to that conversation, not the answer. The liability framing here — outstanding points at expected settlement cost, adjusted for expected breakage — is the starting point an auditor works from. Agree the final treatment with your accountant.