How a Vouchley programme runs, week by week

Most incentive platform websites tell you what the software does. Almost none tell you what the next three months of your life look like if you buy it.

Here is the whole thing, week by week, with the work split named at every step.

The short version: Vouchley builds the programme, you make the decisions, and the target is around four weeks from signature to your first participant earning points.

Before anything starts: five decisions

These are yours, they take one meeting, and everything else follows from them.

1. Who is in the programme. Which dealers, which branches, which people. The practical question is whether you reward individuals or locations — a dealership where one person controls the sales conversation is different from a trade counter with six staff sharing the outcome. Vouchley supports both.

2. What earns points. Sales volume is the common answer, but it is not the only one. Some programmes pay on specific product lines, some on new-account openings, some on a mix. The narrower the definition, the more the programme steers behaviour rather than just rewarding activity.

3. The earn rate. How many sales dollars earn 100 points. This is the single most consequential number in the design, and it is fixed for the life of the programme — so nobody's balance is ever re-based under them. Vouchley models it with you against your budget before anything is locked.

4. The monthly budget cap. The most a programme may issue in a month. It is a hard stop — the platform refuses earning past it, rather than warning you afterwards.

5. What it looks like. Your logo, your accent colour, your sender name. Participants should feel like they are in your programme, not a vendor's.

That is the decision set. Everything below is execution, and most of it is ours.

Weeks 1–2 — Vouchley builds it

You send us the decisions. We build the programme.

What Vouchley does:

• Creates the programme with your eligibility rules, earn rate, budget cap and rollover policy.
• Configures the reward catalogue for your participants.
• Applies your branding across the participant experience and every email that goes out under your name.
• Sets up the route your sales data takes in — whichever of the five fits your systems, including building a mapping by hand if your file matches nothing standard.
• Prepares your participant list from whatever you can give us.

What you do: answer questions. That is genuinely it for these two weeks.

What you need to have ready: a participant list with names and email addresses, your logo in a usable format, and someone who can point us at the sales data. The list is the item that most often causes delay — not because it is hard, but because it usually lives in three places.

The concierge model, stated plainly. Vouchley does the operational setup on every tier. This is not a service level you upgrade into. The reasoning: the operational surfaces have a big blast radius and benefit from us doing them, and the marketing surfaces have a small blast radius and benefit from your own brand voice. So we build; you run your own campaigns.

Week 3 — the data path proves itself

The step everyone underestimates, so we do it before launch rather than during it.

We take a real file — or a real feed — and run it end to end. Points credit against real participants at your rate. You look at the result and tell us whether the numbers are right, because you are the only one who can.

Why this matters more than it sounds. The most common way an incentive programme dies is that nobody can get the sales data out of the system it lives in, so points stop crediting in month three and participants stop checking. A dry run in week three finds that problem while it is still a scheduling question rather than a credibility one.

What you do: look at one screen and confirm the numbers match your understanding of the same period. Fifteen minutes.

Week 4 — launch

Invitations go out when you say so. Not when the data loads, not when setup finishes — when you decide. Nothing is sent to your network automatically at any point before this.

Participants get a branded email, set a password, and land in the programme. They can see their balance, browse the catalogue, and understand what earns points.

Then the first-earn moment. The first time a participant's balance moves is the moment the programme becomes real to them. It is worth making sure it happens quickly — which usually means loading a period of recent history at launch so nobody logs in to a zero balance and a promise.

What you do: decide the send moment, and tell your network it is coming through your own channels. A programme announced by the brand lands differently from one that arrives as an unexpected email.

Month 1 — first redemptions

The proof point. A participant converts points into something that arrives at their door.

Vouchley handles the whole path: the order, the payment, the fulfilment, the delivery updates, and support if anything goes wrong. Orders are placed for fulfilment within 1 business day; delivery typically 3–10 business days.

What you watch: the redemption rate — the share of issued points actually being spent. It is the earliest honest signal you have. Points sitting unspent look like a cost saving on a spreadsheet and almost always mean the programme is not landing.

What you do: nothing operational. Look at the dashboard once a week.

Months 2–3 — the programme starts working for you

Two things change.

You start running promotions. A standing programme rewards behaviour; a promotion changes it. Vouchley sets your first campaign up with you, and after that the builders are yours — pick a type, set it up, tell your network, launch. Every promotion is checked against your budget cap before it goes live, with the projected cost on screen first. There is no approval queue, because the cap and per-person capabilities do that job without the delay.

You start reporting revenue, if you want a return figure. Each month you can enter the additional revenue you attribute to the programme and pick the method you used. Vouchley divides it by what the programme cost and shows the multiple, labelled as your own reported figure. Vouchley does not measure, verify, track or audit your sales — the number is yours, the arithmetic is ours, and the screen says so.

You need three months of reported figures before a multiple appears. One month is not enough to be worth a ratio, and we would rather show you totals than a number that pretends to more precision than it has.

Steady state — the monthly rhythm

Once it is running, a healthy programme takes a few hours a month.

Vouchley's side, continuously: fulfilment, delivery, returns and refunds, participant support, integration monitoring, invoicing.

Who does what — the whole split on one table

What could slow it down

Stated up front, because these are the three that actually happen.

Your participant list. Usually the long pole. It lives in a CRM, a spreadsheet and someone's memory, and reconciling it takes longer than anyone plans for.

Sales-system access. Not the integration itself — the internal approval to connect to it. Start that conversation in week one, not week three.

An unresolved decision. Most often the earn rate, because it is the one with a real cost attached. Vouchley will model options, but the call is yours, and the build waits on it.

None of these is a Vouchley-side delay, which is deliberate — we would rather tell you where the risk actually sits than promise a timeline that assumes your side is frictionless.

Ready to see it?

A 45-minute demo walks the admin side, the participant side, and models your own numbers live. Nothing to prepare.

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Related reading: The channel-incentive field guide · Designing an incentive that can't blow the budget · Five ways your sales data can reach us · Pricing