Points you have issued and not paid out are a promise on your books. For most shops that number only goes one way, because a balance earned in 2022 by somebody who never came back sits there forever, counting toward a liability that will never be claimed.
Perkie can let those lapse. Under Settings, the programme-wide choice is either never, or expire after a set number of months of inactivity.
What counts as inactivity
Not buying. Not logging in. Earning or redeeming.
Any transaction on the balance resets the clock, which means a customer who shops twice a year is never at risk, and neither is one who redeems occasionally without buying. The clock only runs for people who have genuinely stopped.
Customers with no activity at all are measured from when their record was created, so a balance that was imported and never touched ages the same way.
What happens when it lapses
The balance drops to zero and the ledger records the reason, so the entry explains itself when somebody asks why. The customer keeps their account, their tier history and their record. They start again from zero rather than being removed.
It runs in batches, so a shop with a large dormant list doesn’t get one enormous job.
This isn’t the same as points expiring
Two different things, set in two different places, and worth keeping straight.
Coupon expiry lives on the Redemption tab. It controls how long a coupon stays valid once a customer has turned points into one.
Balance expiry is this, on the General tab, and it’s about the balance itself going stale through disuse.
You can run either, both, or neither.
Worth thinking about before you switch it on
A balance is something you promised. Taking it back is defensible when somebody has been gone for years and unreasonable when they have been gone for eight months, and where that line sits is a judgement about your customers rather than a setting with a right answer.
Longer windows do less work on the liability and cause less upset. Shorter ones do the reverse. Most shops that use this at all set it generously, because the point is clearing genuinely dead balances rather than reclaiming points from people who might still come back.
Whatever you choose, say so in your programme terms, and check that what customers can read matches what the setting does.