Auditing a Coupon List Before It Embarrasses You
An expired coupon that still circulates costs goodwill at the till: staff either honour a dead offer or argue with a customer who printed it in good faith. A list nobody audits grows stale quietly, because each coupon looks fine on its own. This auditor reads the whole list at once and sorts it into expired, expiring soon, valid, and broken rows, so the cleanup is one pass instead of a line-by-line hunt.
What counts as expiring soon
The expiring-soon window is yours to set — 30 days by default. A coupon inside the window is still valid, but it needs a decision: extend it, replace it, or let it lapse and remove it from circulation. Coupons with missing codes or unparseable dates are listed separately, because they cannot be honoured reliably even if the offer text looks fine.
After the audit
- Remove expired codes from every place they appear — posters, emails, and the till list.
- Decide on expiring-soon codes before they lapse, not after.
- Fix broken rows: a coupon with an invalid date is a dispute waiting to happen.
- Keep the audited CSV with the campaign file as the record of what was live and when.