Twenty terms you will meet in the first two conversations about a channel incentive programme, written the way somebody would explain them to you rather than the way a vendor would.
Alphabetical. Each entry says what the term means, and — where it matters — what to watch for.
Attribution
Deciding which sales to credit to the programme. Attribution is a judgement, not a measurement — you are choosing a comparison (this month against the same month last year, this region against a similar one) and treating the difference as the programme's effect.
Watch for: any vendor who describes attribution as something their platform performs on your behalf. Attribution requires knowledge of your business that no incentive platform has.
See also: counterfactual, incremental sales.
Budget cap
The maximum reward value a programme may issue in a period. On Vouchley it is a monthly figure, and it is a hard stop — earning that would exceed it is refused rather than flagged.
Watch for: the difference between a cap that blocks and a cap that alerts. Only one of them is a ceiling.
See also: The channel-incentive field guide.
Cash top-up
Letting a participant pay the difference with their own card when they want something worth more than their points balance. Where it is offered, it can turn a "not yet" into a purchase and lift how a catalogue feels in the early months of a programme.
Watch for: whether the vendor takes a cut of the top-up. Where a programme offers it, Vouchley takes no cut.
Catalogue points price
What an item costs a participant, in points. On Vouchley it is the retailer cost plus a fixed, modest uplift — a transparent, cost-plus price, verifiable against public retail — and digital gift cards carry no uplift at all. One hundred points is one dollar of catalogue value, for every programme.
Watch for: a catalogue where the same item is priced differently for different customers, or where the markup is described as a range. Both make the reward cost impossible to forecast.
See also: The channel-incentive field guide.
Channel incentive
A programme that rewards the people who sell your product but do not work for you — distributors, dealers, trade resellers, retail floor staff. Distinct from employee recognition, which rewards your own staff, and from customer loyalty, which rewards the end buyer.
Watch for: platforms built for one of those three and sold into the others. The mechanics look similar and the design problems are not remotely the same.
Counterfactual
What would have happened without the programme. It is the number every return calculation is secretly trying to estimate, and it does not exist anywhere — you cannot run the year twice.
Watch for: this is the honest reason no incentive return figure is a fact. It does not make the figure useless; it makes the method behind it the thing worth scrutinising.
See also: Honest ROI.
Earn rate
How much selling activity produces how many points. Expressed on Vouchley as the sales dollars that earn 100 points — you nominate it at onboarding, and it is fixed for the life of the programme.
Watch for: the fixing. A rate that can be revised mid-programme means every balance your participants hold can be quietly devalued, and they will notice. The rate is also the single most consequential number in the design: it determines cost, perceived generosity, and how quickly anyone can afford anything.
Incremental sales
The sales that would not have happened otherwise. The whole economic case for an incentive programme rests on this number, and it is always an estimate.
Watch for: the gap between incremental sales and total sales during a promotion. Paying an incentive on volume that was already coming is not a failure — it is unavoidable — but a programme where most of the payout is non-incremental is expensive goodwill rather than a growth lever.
Leaderboard
A ranked table of participants over a period, usually with rewards for the top positions.
Watch for: the bottom half. A leaderboard across a network with uneven territories rewards geography rather than effort, and everyone who cannot realistically place stops looking within two cycles. Best used across a genuinely matched cohort.
See also: The channel-incentive field guide.
Participant
The person who earns and redeems — a dealer principal, a rep, a counter salesperson, a store manager. Also called an end user.
Watch for: the word "user", which slides between the participant and the administrator running the programme, and hides which one a vendor is talking about. They have completely different needs.
Points liability
The value of points your participants have earned and not yet spent. It is a real obligation, it sits on your books rather than the platform's, and it grows quietly while nobody is looking at it.
Watch for: two different numbers with the same name — the face value of outstanding points, and the estimated cost of eventually fulfilling them. Both are legitimate; your accountant will want to know which one you are quoting.
Principal Brand
One brand motivating its own single network. A manufacturer rewarding its dealer network, a supplier rewarding the retail staff who stock it. One programme, one audience, one budget.
Watch for: the contrast with a Supplier (below), which is a genuinely different operating shape rather than a bigger version of the same thing.
See also: For OEMs and suppliers.
Programme
The standing arrangement: who is eligible, what earns points, at what rate, against what budget, redeemable in what catalogue. A programme runs continuously. Things happen inside it.
Watch for: "programme" and "campaign" being used interchangeably. A campaign is a time-boxed push inside a programme. Conflating them is how a business ends up with a three-week burst of activity and calls it an incentive strategy.
Promotion
A time-boxed mechanic layered on top of a running programme — a multiplier, a product bonus, a target, a leaderboard. Promotions are what keeps a programme alive between quarters.
Watch for: stacking. Two sensible promotions running simultaneously on the same transaction can pay several times the intended rate.
Redemption
A participant spending points on something. The moment the programme becomes real to them — a balance is an abstraction until the first parcel arrives.
Watch for: the redemption rate, meaning the share of issued points actually spent. A low rate looks like cost saving on a spreadsheet and is almost always the earliest sign the programme is dying.
Rollover policy
What happens to budget you did not use. Vouchley offers four: no rollover, roll to next month, refund to you as a credit note, or accumulate against the programme's running total.
Watch for: rollover that compounds indefinitely, which converts an unspent budget into an uncapped one over enough quiet months.
Sell-in and sell-through
Sell-in is product moving from you to your distributor or retailer. Sell-through is product moving from them to the end customer.
Watch for: which one your incentive actually pays on. Rewarding sell-in pays for stock sitting in a warehouse, and can end up funding a distributor's inventory decision rather than any selling at all. Rewarding sell-through is harder to get data for and is almost always the behaviour you actually want. This single distinction is the most expensive thing on this page to get wrong.
Statement of Work
The document that sets the commercial terms for your specific programme — the fees, the participant and location numbers, the term, the budget cap. It sits under a Master Services Agreement, which sets the legal framework once and does not change per programme.
Watch for: the split. The MSA is negotiated once. Each new programme gets its own Statement of Work, which is where anything customer-specific belongs.
Supplier
A business selling through several customer networks, running a programme per network — different branding, different budget, different administrators, side by side in one account.
Watch for: separation. One network's participants must never see another's, and the administrator of one customer's programme must never see another customer's data. If a platform cannot demonstrate that boundary, it is a single-network tool being sold as a multi-network one.
See also: For OEMs and suppliers.
Tier
Two different things, depending on who is speaking.
Participant tiers — Bronze, Silver, Gold, Platinum — are status levels inside a programme, earned by activity over a rolling period.
Pricing tiers — Starter, Scale, Enterprise — are Vouchley's subscription levels, sized by how many participants, locations and programmes you run.
Watch for: the ambiguity. Ask which one is meant; the answer changes the conversation completely.
See also: Pricing.
Still translating?
If a term came up in a conversation and it is not on this list, email sales@vouchley.com.au and we will explain it in plain English — whether or not it has anything to do with Vouchley.
Related reading: The channel-incentive field guide — the full guide to how these programmes are structured, what they cost, and what good design looks like.
Want to walk this through against your own programme?
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