Promoted Items & Societies¶
How to use Promoted Items and Societies in CRM, and what your members see in the app.
1 · Promoted Items¶
What it is for. Promoting individual menu items at a venue price so a venue's public website can show them — for example Guinness, Pint, £3.50, 2-for-1 before 7pm.
Where to find it. CRM → Promoted Items in the left sidebar.
The one thing to understand first¶
Prices are never stored in CRM.
You are not typing a price. You are pointing at a price that already exists on the till, in a non-default POS price tier — a happy-hour or food-deal tier. The website reads that price live. Change it on the till and the website follows, with no CRM edit at all.
This means a price tier must already exist at the venue before you can promote anything from it. If the tier you want is not in the dropdown, it needs setting up in POS first.
Adding a promoted item¶
- Choose the venue at the top of the page. The list below is always for one venue.
- Press Add.
- Pick the Price Tier — the happy hour or deal the price comes from.
- Pick the Menu Item. Type in the search box to filter. You are choosing a specific item and unit of sale: Guinness Pint and Guinness Half are two separate choices, because the till prices them separately.
- Write the Promo Text — the free-text line the website shows, e.g. "2-for-1 before 7pm".
- Optionally set a Display Name to override how the item is named publicly. Leave it blank to use the POS name.
- Save.
Changing the price tier clears your item choice.
That is deliberate — items are priced per tier, so a pick from the old tier may not exist in the new one. Re-pick the item after switching.
Reading the list¶
| Column | What it shows |
|---|---|
| Product | The item name, with the unit of sale beneath it. If you set a Display Name, the real POS name shows underneath so you can still tell what it is. |
| Price | Fetched live from the till, not from CRM. |
| Price Tier | Which tier the price comes from. |
| Promo Text | The line the website displays. |
Ordering¶
Use ▲ Up and ▼ Down to set the order the website shows them in. There is no drag-and-drop.
An amber row saying "— no longer priced in this tier"¶
The item has fallen out of its tier on the till.
Someone removed that price in POS, so there is nothing for the website to show. The row is highlighted amber and the price is replaced with that message.
What to do: either restore the price in POS, or point the row at a different tier, or delete it. Leaving it will show nothing useful publicly.
If the till is unreachable altogether, rows are not marked amber — an outage is deliberately kept distinguishable from a genuinely missing price, so you never delete a good row during a POS blip.
Retiring a promotion¶
There is no on/off switch and no date range.
To retire a promotion, delete the row. Availability is whatever the price tier itself says — the tier's own start and end dates and its day-of-week windows are what the website honours.
So a happy hour that only runs Mondays 5–7pm needs no CRM dates: set that on the tier in POS, and the promoted item inherits it.
2 · Societies — in CRM¶
Where to find it. CRM → Societies.
Adding a society — the wizard¶
Press Add Society. This opens a wizard, not the old form.
Why it changed.
The old Add form asked you to pick a group from a flat dropdown of every group in the estate — so the tree had to be built by hand first, then picked from correctly. Those were the two steps most likely to file a society under the wrong year. The wizard reads the tree instead, and shows you the path before anything is written.
| Field | Notes |
|---|---|
| Academic year | Proposed for you — the next year after the latest one that exists. |
| Valid from / Valid to | Prefilled from the year. These decide when the society is joinable and when it goes read-only. |
| Institution | Pick an existing one, choose New institution… and name it, or Directly under the year group for none. |
| Society name | The society as people call it. |
| Group name | Proposed automatically as the year token plus the society name. Edit it if your naming differs — once edited, it stops following the society name. |
| Home venues | The venues associated with the society. |
Where it will go. The wizard shows the full group path as you fill it in. Read that line before submitting — it is the whole point of the wizard.
If the wizard will not submit
Two messages stop it, both about the year group rather than anything you typed:
- "No group names academic year X, and no earlier year exists to derive one from." — create the year group first.
- "More than one group names academic year X." — the wizard cannot tell which to use. Resolve the duplicate naming.
Editing a society¶
Edit on a row opens the plain form — a different set of fields from the wizard:
| Field | Notes |
|---|---|
| Group | The contact group whose members are the society. Drives offer eligibility and rebate reporting. |
| Academic Year | The year this record is for. |
| Valid From / Valid To | The active period. |
| Home Venues | Associated venues. |
Changing Group moves the society — read the path before you do.
Each option shows its full path, e.g. Universities / 2026-27 / Liverpool Uni / 26 Chess Club, sorted so siblings sit together. That is there so you can tell the right academic year from an identically named group under the wrong one. Nothing validates it for you, so read it.
The consequence is the part to weigh. This society already has members, and its group drives offer eligibility and rebate reporting — re-pointing it moves both. If you need to change a society's group, check with whoever owns reporting first.
Everything else on this form — the year, the dates, the home venues — is safe to edit.
Valid From / Valid To decide almost everything.
A society only appears on the customer app's Join a society list while today falls inside that period. Once Valid To passes, the society goes read-only — see section 3.
Managers and Visits¶
Two further dialogs on each society row. Managers sets who runs the society — these are the people who approve join requests in the customer app, so this is the first thing to check when a member says nobody is responding. Visits records society visits.
Cloning an academic year¶
At the end of a year, rather than rebuilding every society by hand, you can clone a whole year's societies into the next one.
- Open the clone dialog from the Societies page.
- Enter the source year and target year, and the Valid From / Valid To dates the new societies should carry.
- Press Preview. Nothing is written yet.
- Read the plan. For each society it shows the source group name, the new name, and how many members, managers and home venues would carry over. It also shows, level by level, whether each group in the tree would be created or an existing one reused.
- Check the warnings list, if there is one.
- Only then press Clone.
Preview is compulsory, by design.
The Clone button stays disabled until you have previewed. If the preview reports errors — as opposed to warnings — the run refuses outright rather than guessing at a group tree it cannot read. Fix the naming it complains about and preview again.
A society already present in the target year is skipped rather than duplicated, and the preview tells you which ones and why. If a clone fails partway, nothing is written.
Society rebate reports¶
The three society rebate reports under CRM → Reporting — spend, Friday fixed and weekend — are unchanged by this work and behave as they always have. They are not covered here.
Locking the year trees¶
Found under CRM → Groups, as Lock society year trees.
The year clone builds a tree of groups. Locking those trees stops new groups being hand-added inside them, which keeps the structure the clone depends on from drifting out of shape between years.
- Open the dialog. It previews automatically — the boundary of each tree is worked out by reading the estate, rather than firing blind.
- Read the count: "N groups to lock", plus how many are already locked.
- Press Lock N groups.
The button stays disabled when there is nothing to do. "No society trees found to lock" means exactly that — it is not an error.
Run this after a clone, not before.
A clone creates the new year's groups; locking afterwards protects what it has just built. If a later clone preview complains about a tree it cannot read, hand-added groups in an unlocked tree are the usual cause.
3 · Societies — what customers and managers see¶
This all lives in the customer app, not CRM. Worth knowing because it is what your members will ring up about.
For a member¶
| Screen | What happens there |
|---|---|
| My societies | The societies they belong to. A prompt — "Looking to join one?" — leads to the join page. |
| Join a society | Lists societies whose valid period covers today. They pick one and request to join. The page then shows Request pending. |
A join request is not a membership. Until a manager approves it, the person gets no society offers and does not appear in rebate reporting. That separation is deliberate.
For a society manager¶
Managers open their society and see a Pending requests section above the member list, so requests are in front of them whenever they visit. From there they approve or decline. They can also Add new member directly by mobile number.
Emails sent automatically¶
| When | Who gets it |
|---|---|
| Someone requests to join | The society's managers. The link in the email goes straight to that request. |
| A request is approved or declined | The member who asked. |
When the year ends¶
Past societies become read-only.
Once Valid To has passed, the members page shows "This society's year has ended. Its member list is read-only." Members are visible for reference, but nobody can be added, removed, approved or declined.
This is the normal end-of-year state, not a fault. If a manager needs to change a past society, the dates in CRM are what to look at.
Two things people ask¶
"I declined someone by mistake." They can simply request again — declined requests do not block a fresh one. The declined row is kept for audit.
"Why can't I see the society to join?" Almost always because today falls outside its Valid From / Valid To, or its group is hidden. Both are CRM settings.
4 · Quick reference¶
Common situations¶
| You see… | It means… | Do this |
|---|---|---|
| Amber row, "no longer priced in this tier" | The price was removed from that tier on the till | Restore it in POS, re-point the row, or delete it |
| The price tier you want is missing | It does not exist at that venue yet | Set the tier up in POS first |
| Clone button will not enable | You have not previewed, or the preview found errors | Preview; fix any naming it reports; preview again |
| "No group names academic year X" | The year group does not exist yet | Create the year group, then re-open the wizard |
| "More than one group names academic year X" | Duplicate year-group naming | Resolve the duplicate before adding societies to that year |
| "This society's year has ended" | Valid To has passed | Normal. Check the dates in CRM if it is wrong |
| A society's members lost their offers | Its Group may have been changed on the Edit form | Check the society's group; that field moves eligibility and rebate reporting with it |
| A society is missing from the join list | Outside its valid period, or its group is hidden | Check Valid From / Valid To in CRM |
Worth remembering¶
- Promoted item prices are never stored by us. The till is the source of truth.
- Retiring a promotion means deleting the row — there is no off switch.
- Promotion timing lives on the POS price tier, not on the promoted item.
- A pending join request grants nothing until approved.
- Always preview a clone. It is the only view of what it will do.
- Add Society uses the wizard; Edit uses the old form. They ask for different things.
- Read the full path before changing Group on the Edit form — it moves offer eligibility and rebate reporting.
- Lock the year trees after a clone, so the structure cannot drift before the next one.
Screens change; if something here does not match what you see, trust the screen and let us know.