Most membership systems that cinemas operate will have cards made up in advance and do not contain the customer's name or other details. When a customer joins up (at the cinema) a card will be given to them, and their details will be recorded in Loyalty.

POS supports reading a membership number from a swipe on the card or a bar code on the card. Vista uses Track 2 to retrieve the card number. Track 2 can only support numeric characters (and up to 39 numbers), so the membership number must be numeric. For example, 900000012345. See Track 2 ISO Standard for details.

Assigning a number for members

Membership numbers do not need an identifier portion within their number unlike gift cards. Some cinemas may still use the same number of digits in a membership card number and have the leading digits as a unique identifier. For example, 90000 could represent their membership cards, but it isn't compulsory.

You may want to use the identified portion to represent a club. For example, 90000 for film club members and 90010 for your staff club. You could add this identifier in order for your staff to recognise the club to which the card belongs.

Configure member card number formats in Head Office maintenance under Card definitions and Member card range.

Track 2 ISO standard

The format of track 2 must follow the ISO standard which is also used by credit cards.

• There must be a semi colon ; preceding the membership number
• There must be an equals symbol = following the membership number and before the expiry date
• There must be an expiry date on track 2. Even though Loyalty will check the Loyalty system for the member's actual expiry date, a fake expiry date must exist for track 2 to satisfy the ISO standard format. The format of the expiry date is MMYY. Make the expiry date 1299 meaning December 2099.
• There must be a question mark ? at the end of the track 2 data. As there will be no more information on this track, put it straight after the expiry date.

Example

The format of the card number below follows the ISO standard.

;900000012345=0306?