A verified return is a visit somebody scanned at your counter. Not an opened email, not a clicked link, not an estimate. The person was standing in front of you, they showed their card, they bought something.
It needs a word of its own because almost every marketing metric counts something else and calls it a win.
What an open rate actually measures
It measures that a piece of software loaded an image, or that a preview appeared in a list. It does not measure reading, still less intent, and certainly not a visit. A click-through rate is one notch better and is still a bet: the customer opened a page, they bought nothing.
These figures are not useless, they are badly named. They measure how a message performed, not how a business performed. The trouble starts when a dashboard puts them big in the middle of the screen, because a number shown large becomes the number you try to raise, and you can raise an open rate all year without one extra person walking in.
A scan at the counter is a fact. An email open is a guess. Both can be counted, but only one of them pays your rent.
How the rule is held in the code
A definition that depends on the discipline of whoever writes the code does not survive six months. This one is structural.
Kanz keeps a two-level record of proof. The upper level means a real scan closed the loop, and the function that writes proof at that level requires the visit ID: there is deliberately no way to call it without one. Its twin, the function that records a probable sighting, cannot produce the upper level, because the level is written into its body.
Put another way, the only route to a verified return in the counters is for a visit to exist. There is no alternative code path, no setting, no emergency call to flatter a number.
One nuance matters, and it is written in the same place: upper-level proof does not claim the amount spent is exact. That amount is often the middle of a price band. What it asserts is that the return happened. Conflating the two would be precisely the kind of vagueness this page is trying to remove.
The same discipline on what you pay
The number of active customers is what decides your plan. An active customer is someone who has been scanned at least once in the last 90 days.
That number is counted on the visits table, counting distinct customers, and not on a "last visit" column copied onto the customer record. The column would be quicker to read and it can drift; the visits table is the source. The reasoning is simple: this number is a billing input, so the figure on your invoice and the figure on your dashboard must not be able to contradict each other.
It is the same principle as the proof, applied to money: the measurement always reads the real event, never the summary.
Why the trial is counted in returns
A Kanz trial ends at whichever comes first: 30 days, or 10 verified returns.
The second counter exists because a trial that ends because the product worked ten times tells a true story, while a trial that ends because a month went by tells you nothing at all. And when the two land together, it is the number of returns that gets announced, because that is the one that means something to the person reading it.
What you should look at every month
Three numbers, and none of them is an open rate.
How many active customers. That is your real base, not the number of cards handed out. A card handed out and never scanned is a piece of card in a drawer.
How many of them have fallen out of their rhythm. That is the month's workload, and it is a number that should stay small. If it grows every month, the problem is not loyalty, it sits further upstream.
How many came back after being flagged. That is the only figure that says whether any of this machinery is worth having, and it is a count of visits, not a percentage of opens.
What puts somebody out of their rhythm is set out in this article, and what the whole thing costs in another.