Coins & Rewards

Coins are QuestLore's virtual currency. Employees earn Coins by completing quests and can spend them in the Rewards Catalogue on real items or experiences chosen by their organisation.

Coins are separate from Experience Points — Experience Points measures growth and level progression, while Coins fuel motivation through tangible rewards. Both are awarded simultaneously when a quest is approved.

Each quest awards Coins alongside its Experience Points reward. When a completed quest is approved by a reviewer, both the Experience Points and Coins are credited to the member's balance simultaneously.

Coin rewards are fixed org-wide per difficulty. The owner configures four values — Easy, Medium, Hard, and Expert — under Organization → Settings → Rewards Economy. Every quest of a given difficulty pays exactly that number of Coins. There is no per-quest coin override.

The Rewards Economy is the owner-only configuration that governs how Coins flow through the entire organisation. It lives at Organization → Settings and is accessible only to owners.

The key settings are:

• Annual rewards budget & currency — the real-money budget (e.g. USD 10,000) allocated to employee rewards each year.
• Exchange rate — how many Coins equal one unit of currency (e.g. 100 coins per USD). Together with the budget this defines the annual Coin pool.
• Quest difficulty coin rewards — four fixed values (Easy, Medium, Hard, Expert) that apply to every quest in the organisation. There are no per-quest overrides.
• Weekly quest start caps — how many quests of each difficulty a member can self-start per week. Used to compute the maximum Coins any one employee could earn.
• Headcount & monthly redemption cap — the number of eligible employees and a per-employee monthly spending cap (in currency) to prevent a single employee from clearing the store after hoarding Coins.
• Bonuses budget (optional) — an annual pool of Coins managers can award ad-hoc for exceptional contributions outside the quest cycle.

The settings page shows a live projection panel — annual Coin pool, per-employee caps, max annual organisation liability, and warnings if the policy would exceed budget. Saving the policy takes effect immediately for new quest starts and store purchases; quests already in-flight pay the Coin reward that was snapshotted when they were started.

Non-owners see only the four difficulty coin reward values (displayed on quest cards and in the Quests Library). All budget and headcount figures are owner-only.

See the Organization Settings article for a full field-by-field reference.

The Rewards Catalogue is a shop where employees can spend their accumulated Coins. Owners and managers populate the catalogue with Products — physical items, gift cards, experiences, or anything the organisation wants to offer.

Each product has a weeks-to-earn value set by the manager — for example, "2 weeks" means a typical employee earning at the maximum weekly rate should be able to afford this product in roughly two weeks. The live Coin price is computed automatically from the organisation's Rewards Economy policy (weeks-to-earn × max weekly coins per employee). If the owner later changes the economy settings, product prices update to match — but the Coin price of any order already placed is snapshotted at checkout and is never retroactively changed.

Members browse the catalogue, place orders, and their Coin balance is deducted automatically upon checkout. Managers review and fulfil orders from Organization → Orders.

A few important rules govern Coin balances:

• No negative balance — the platform prevents any transaction that would reduce a member's balance below zero. Members cannot spend more Coins than they have.
• No upper cap — there is no maximum Coin balance. Members can accumulate as many Coins as they earn.
• Monthly redemption cap — the owner can set a per-employee monthly redemption budget under Organization → Settings → Rewards Economy. Once an employee's Coin purchases for the current calendar month reach that cap, further purchases are blocked until the next month resets. Refunded orders are excluded from the cap, so a refund frees up budget again.
• Full transaction history — every Coin credit and debit is logged and visible to the member under Profile → Transactions.