Five portals, a folder of emails and a customer at the counter
A customer comes in with a cycle to work certificate on their phone. They chose a bike three weeks ago and asked for a quote. Their employer has now approved it through a scheme provider such as Cyclescheme, and they want to collect today. Someone at the counter has to find the quote, check the bike is still in stock in the right size, log into the right scheme's retailer portal, redeem the certificate and put the sale through the till in a way the scheme will accept.
Then it happens again with a different scheme, whose portal works differently. By the end of the month there is a pile of certificates where the bike has gone out of the door but nobody is sure the claim was submitted, or whether the payment that landed in the bank matches it.
Each scheme has its own process and none of them talk to your till
Several schemes operate, each with its own retailer login, quote format, certificate style, redemption step and payment timing. Your EPOS records the sale, but it has no idea which scheme the sale belongs to or whether the claim has been made. So the link between quote, certificate, sale and payment is kept by a person, usually the owner, usually on a spreadsheet.
- Quotes are given in store or by email and are not tracked against the scheme or the customer.
- Certificates arrive by email, in the customer's app, or printed, and are checked by eye.
- Redemption and claim steps differ by scheme and are easy to half-finish.
- Scheme payments arrive in batches that do not match single sales.
- Accessories added to a voucher sale make the numbers awkward to reconcile.
The admin nobody sees until month end
The time cost is real: logging into portals, cross-checking certificate numbers, searching emails for quotes. It tends to land on whoever knows the process best, which in a small shop is usually the person who should be selling bikes or running the workshop.
The money risk is quieter. A certificate that was never claimed, or a claim that was rejected because a detail did not match, means a bike has left the shop without the full payment arriving. Spotting that months later is harder than spotting it the week it happened. We do not advise on the accounting side; your bookkeeper or accountant decides how these sales are recorded.
One tracker for every voucher sale
We build a cycle to work tracker that holds each voucher sale from the first quote to the payment, whichever scheme it comes through.
- Every quote is logged with the customer, the bike, size, accessories, scheme and date, so it can be found in seconds when the certificate arrives.
- Certificate emails that scheme providers send to your shop are read and matched to the quote automatically. Anything that cannot be matched goes to a short list for a person.
- At collection, the counter screen shows which steps are done and which remain for that scheme, in the order that scheme expects.
- The sale in your EPOS is tagged with the scheme and certificate number, so the till and the tracker agree.
- Payment remittances from each scheme are matched to the claims they cover, and anything unpaid after the scheme's normal period is flagged.
- A weekly summary shows quotes waiting for approval, certificates waiting for collection and claims waiting for payment.
| Stage | Where it lives today | With the tracker |
|---|---|---|
| Quote | Email or paper | Logged with scheme and bike |
| Certificate | Inbox, printed or in an app | Matched to the quote |
| Collection | Steps from memory | Checklist for that scheme |
| Payment | Bank statement guesswork | Matched claim by claim |
A voucher sale becomes routine
Anyone at the counter can handle a cycle to work collection because the tracker shows the steps. The owner stops spending evenings in scheme portals. Month end is a list of exceptions to look at, not a reconstruction job. And when a customer asks whether their bike is ready to collect, the answer is on the screen.
You also see which schemes send you the most business and which employers are nearby, which helps if you want to approach local businesses about their staff scheme.
Signs your voucher admin needs sorting
- Only one person in the shop knows how to process each scheme.
- You keep a spreadsheet to track certificates against sales.
- You have found claims that were never submitted.
- Scheme payments arrive and you are not sure which sales they cover.
- Customers wait at the counter while someone logs into a portal.