Family Rewards Tracker

Family Rewards Tracker is a simple little app that lets you create virtual coupons that you can use to encourage behaviors in your kids. The app lets you reward your kids (or yourself) with your personal currency and easily keep track of its use.

The app provides a list of about 25 different types of icons that you can assign as a coupon type, then provide a name and a description of what the coupon is. Then you just enter the names of each of your family members that might receive one of these coupons. That's it. Each coupon type will show up under your family member's name with their current total along with plus and minus buttons to quickly add or subtract coupons.

This app came about after my young children starting bugging us with, "can we have dessert tonight?". Every night. So my wife and I came up with the idea to give each member of the family, including us, a "Dessert Coupon" every month. The coupons could be used to treat the whole family to dessert once. The coupons can be saved up or used whenever the kids want, but it is a limited commodity. No dessert coupon, no dessert. The questions went away and were replaced by careful scheming of when to use their coupons, like when we're out to eat, and what to use them on, like special desserts that we only make during certain times of the year. The whole family shows appreciation to the person using their coupon so that they experience, not only the benefit of getting the dessert, but also the pleasure of making others happy. It worked so well that we created other coupons for other things. For example, we started using "Bed Time" coupons to extend the kids weekend bed times as payment for chores rather than money.

We needed a way of keeping track of how many coupons of each type a child (or adult) had and allow them to spend and earn coupons easily. To fill this need, rather than printing out real coupons, as cute as that might be, I decided that it would be most useful as a smart-phone app.