Pinogy POS Integration | How to Use the Integration with Astro
Pinogy POS | Full Integration with Astro Loyalty
Pinogy has what you would call a Full Integration with Astro Loyalty. This means that there is no flip flopping back and forth between your POS and Astro during the Checkout process. Pinogy houses everything you need to know about the customer's Astro Pet Owner account right there with the Pinogy Sale.
Pinogy is also an Official POS Partner with Astro Loyalty. Their creators were fully involved in the creation of this integration and will provide you with any tech support you require. If this is the first time you have heard of Pinogy and you are curious about the kind of system they can create for you take some time to check them out. We believe you will be impressed.
Fun Fact - The creator of Pinogy, Nick, has an origin story based in the world of independent pet food/supply retail. He was tired of being told by other POS companies that they couldn't or wouldn't develop features that would benefit him, the independent pet food retailer, so he decided to design his own POS. He offers a Free Trial which you can access here if you are interested in learning more.
What do we love about the Pinogy Integration with Astro?
- The integration will only record purchased items to Astro. If you do not finalize a sale and collect payment for a qualifying frequent buyer purchase it will not be added to Astro.
- If your customer asks how close they are to redeeming a free item you can quickly open their Astro Loyalty tab right their on their Sale and let them know what number they are at. For instance, if they have 5 punches on a Buy 12 card it will say the Name of the Program and 5/12 beside it. If they are in the process of purchasing an item that is going to be added to that card the total will not change to 6/12 until after payment is collected and the sale is finalized.
- When it is time to redeem a frequent buyer card the integration will limit the list of redeemable items for you based on the items in your store's inventory. So you never have to worry about selecting an item from the drop-down menu that you either never purchased from your distributor before. This is extremely helpful when you are redeeming a card for a brand that has a very large product list.
- Pinogy will apply the redemption discount to the sale for you and it will take into account the sales tax owed on the discounted item so the customer is still paying the full tax owed before discount is applied. No more math and fancy workarounds to make sure you are sales tax compliant if your State requires the full sales tax be paid.
- Pinogy records the Astro Reward ID on the Customer's receipt. This is not a requirement, but it comes in extremely handy if a customer comes back and returns an item they previously redeemed. Now you will be able to quickly alert your distributor when an item that was reported as a free good was returned so you can start the approval process to get the card reopened.
Pinogy Support will gladly answer any questions you have about their system and give you a full tour of how their POS System functions outside of Astro Loyalty. For instance, their Inventory maintenance tools are highly intuitive. There are even ways to create Sale Bundles with special pricing if you want to sell certain items together in a group- like New Puppy or Kitten Bundles or Pre-Paid Dog Wash Packages. But Pinogy can tell you more about that and the other tools they have created for you.
How to use Pinogy with Astro Loyalty
The setup and use is relatively straightforward and simple. If you have multiple locations or would like a more detailed explanation on how to setup your Astro account to prepare it for the integration with Pinogy follow this article link - How to Prepare your Astro Account for the Integration with Pinogy.
Enabling the Rest API for Pinogy on your Astro account
The first step will be to contact Astro Loyalty Support and request that we Enable the Rest API for Pinogy on your account. This will generate a Ticket on our Support Desk. Once one of our Agents has enabled the Rest API for you they will let you know. At that point the same username and password that you have been using to log into Astro manually will become your Astro Rest API username and password that you will need to give to Pinogy so the two can communicate with one another.
If you have a multi-location account, make sure that the store's are logging in with the correct username/password for their location, so that the transactions and redemptions are being recorded under the correct location account.
If you want to keep your Astro Admin User free for yourself to do things like enroll in Programs and review Redemption Reports then I suggest that you add a Cashier User to each of your location accounts on Astro. If you have multiple locations an Astro Agent will need to add those locations to your existing Astro Account as sub-locations.
Mapping your Customer's Pinogy Accounts to their Astro Pet Owner Accounts
This is done while you are checking out your customers.
If you choose to you can have an Astro Agent onboard your Pinogy Customer List to Astro beforehand, but this is only recommended for the customer accounts for which you have email addresses.
Even if you opt not to onboard your customers beforehand the mapping process is extremely fast and Pinogy will do most of the work for you.
Add a Customer to the Sale in Pinogy
To associate an existing customer to the sale click the magnifying glass. To add a new customer click the green plus sign and fill in the fields.
Clicking the magnifying glass will bring up your existing customer list. Here you can use the customer's name and contact information to filter your search. Once you have found the customer select them which will highlight them in blue, then click Select to add them to the Sale.
If you are adding a New Customer to the Sale fill in as many of these fields as you require for your records. The integration will take notice of the customer's First and Last Name, their Email Address and their Phone Number and will import this information to Astro for you so you do not have to enter everything a second time.
Pinogy has an extra field called Group that you can use to label customers who also happen to be Breeders, Rescues, Veterans, or any other group that you want to identify if you offer that group any specials at your store. It is an optional field and will always at least label your new customers as "customers".
Once you have finished collecting all your new customer's info you can select Save. This will add them to the Sale.
Once the customer is added to the sale Pinogy will attempt to fetch their Astro account information. If the Pinogy account has not been mapped to an Astro Pet Owner Account for that customer there will be a pop-up to alert you of this. There are multiple options and the one you choose will depend on whether or not you have prepped your Astro account by uploading a customer list or if you have been using Astro prior to Pinogy and already have existing Pet Owner accounts.
You DO NOT have Pre-existing Pet Owner Accounts on your Astro Account.
In this case you would select YES. Doing so will import the customer's name and contact info to Astro and create them a New Pet Owner Account, and then it will map that Pet Owner account to your customer's Pinogy account.
You DO have some Existing Pet Owner Accounts on your Astro Account.
In this case you can try selecting Already In Astro. Doing so will prompt Pinogy to search for this customer's Pet Owner Account on your Astro Account using their Email Address. If it locates the customer you can confirm the match and doing so will map the two accounts together. If it cannot find a Pet Owner Account on your Astro Account with that Email Address it will let you know so you can create them a new Pet Owner Account in Astro.
We recommend that you make an Enrollment (aka a Pet Owner Account) for all of your customers (with their permission of course). Any customer you have in Astro you will be able to communicate with via our Marketing Suite.
What does it mean to "Map" accounts together? This enables the Pinogy Customer Account to both send information to and receive information from the customer's Astro Pet Owner Account and vice versa. It establishes the line of communication between them.
Checking out a Customer in Pinogy
Now that you have a customer associated with a sale in Pinogy you can start scanning in all of their purchases, or adding them to the Pinogy sale however you prefer.
You're going to love this next step. All you need to do to save these purchases to your customer's Pet Owner account is select Pay and finalize the sale. Once you do this you will see the following...
That's right! Pinogy will send your customer's frequent buyer purchases to their Astro Pet Owner Account and add those purchases to their cards for you. There are no extra steps that could be forgotten so customers will never miss out on a purchase credit.
The next screen will look like the following. This customer paid with a Visa and their balance is now 0.00. So all we need to do here is click Finished.
Now you can choose whether or not you will print a receipt for your customer.
If you do decide it print one it will look similar to the following. You will be able to add your store's logo at the top like I was able to add Astro Loyalty to the top of this receipt. Your address will appear as well. It will also show the customer's name and the name of the cashier that checked them out.
Checking your Customer's Frequent Buyer Progress During Checkout
While checking out your customer you can still bring them up to speed about their frequent buyer card progress if they should ask. To do so click on the pencil icon above their name to open up the Customer Information Edit Pop-up.
Now you will see a tab for Astro Loyalty. Select the tab to open it.
There you will see the customer's Astro Pet Owner Account information. Their cards will be listed in alphabetical order and their program titles will be the same as they appear in Astro. Their purchase progress will be clearly stated beside these titles - in this customer's case she has 2 punches on her Primal Dog 3lb Frozen Nugget card so she is 10 punches away from her goal of 12.
The Card ID Number is present as well as the customer's Astro ID, this information is useful if you need to communicate with Astro about the customer's account.
There is an Unlink option as well if you find an error was made when you first linked their Pinogy Account to their Astro Account.
Tip - When you link a new customer to Astro it is a good idea to check their Astro Loyalty Tab to make sure they were in fact linked correctly.Once you are done reviewing the customer's information you can click Save to return to the sale.
How to Redeem a Free Good with the Pinogy POS
You are going to love how simple this is!
Start by adding your customer to the Pinogy Sale Tab. This is done by clicking the magnifying glass icon near the bottom left of the sale tab.
The moment you add a customer's account to a sale Pinogy will refer to Astro to see if there are any free goods waiting- Getting AstroLoyalty customer status. It took a couple tries for me to screenshot this (see image below) because Pinogy is so quick about it. This particular customer account has at least a dozen open Frequent Buyer Cards on their Astro account and Pinogy was still able to find the one with a pending free good in a matter of seconds.
If Pinogy locates a card with an unredeemed reward it will tell you about it right away, before you even have a chance to ring up their order. In the pop-up below Pinogy has told us that this customer qualifies for a free bag of Primal Dog Frozen Chicken Nuggets. To redeem the item all you have to do is select it, then click the Select button once it turns green.
To be 110% sure that Pinogy got it right I referred to the Frequent Buyer Card on my Astro Account directly to see if Chicken was in fact the only redeemable option for this customer's card, and sure enough it was! I am confident that Pinogy will only show you valid redeemable options based on your customer's purchase history. Pinogy will also go one further, it will only show you redeemable options that are in your inventory! So you never have to worry about accidentally selecting a free good that you no longer, or never carried, at your store.
Once you have selected the appropriate free good from the pop-up, Pinogy will once again handle the tricky bits for you and add it to your sale and discount it all in one fell swoop!
On the sale, below the Discount there is a Note that contains an Astro Reward Number. All Astro Rewards are assigned an unique ID# so you can locate them quickly in your records or communicate easily with your distributor or vendor about a specific redemption. This number will be on the Free Goods Redemption that will be automatically submitted to your distributor via Astro on your Distributor Free Goods Credit Status Report, this number will also appear on all of your Redemption Reports, and it will show up on your customer's Astro Petowner Account on their redeemed card in their History.
We haven't even reached the best part! Checkout the Subtotal, Discounts, Tax and Total on the sale in the image above. Notice how the Discount cancels out the Subtotal. On most POS Systems that would make the Total $0.00 - but that's not a good thing since most States have tax laws that require the customer to pay the Pre-Discount Tax owed on a Free/Discounted Item.
Never fear! Pinogy has that detail covered as well. Notice that the customer is still paying the $1.33 Tax even though the only thing on their sale today has been discounted 100%. This little detail is going to save you during tax season for sure, and if you are in a state where the customer doesn't have to pay the sales tax it can be easily removed in your Pinogy settings.
Now, if your customer is purchasing other items during their visit you can ring them up at this point. Make sure not to ring up their "Primal Chicken Nuggets" as a purchase (or whatever free item they are getting today) since it is already recorded on their sale as a Free Good.
Once you have finished tallying up their sale you can click Pay and record and collect their payment as you would normally. Then select Finish.
If your customer asks you for a paper copy of their receipt you will notice that all the important details of their free good redemption are recorded, including the Astro Reward ID#.
There is no need to save a receipt for your Frequent Buyer Reporting. Astro is already reporting these Primal Dog Chicken Nuggets to my chosen distributor. To follow along with the crediting process login to your Astro Account as an Admin User and go to your Reports menu and select Distributor Free Goods Credit Status. Here you will see when your distributor marks a Free Good report as Credited, which lets you know that your credit is on its way to you.
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