Start on the Customers tab, not Insights
The whole five-minute review happens on one screen: the Customers tab. It opens with a strip of four tiles across the top, and those four tiles answer the only question worth asking on a Monday. Is the base growing, and is it still awake. Everything else on the dashboard is detail you can read when you have twenty minutes instead of five.
Insights is the tab that looks like the important one. It has a period picker, a daily activity chart, busiest hours, and a top-customers table. It's genuinely useful, but it's a reporting screen: it tells you what happened. The Customers tab is a decision screen. It tells you who to do something about this week.
One thing to know before you go looking. The Insights tab is part of the Growth plan at 85 SAR a month. The Customers tab works on the Free plan, up to the 100-customer limit. So if you're on Free, the four tiles below are your entire weekly review, and that's fine, because they're the four that matter.
The four tiles, in reading order
Read them left to right, which is also the order they were built in. First, Total customers. This is every card ever issued for your shop, lifetime. Compare it to the number you wrote down last Monday. The difference is how many new people scanned your QR code and added a pass to Apple Wallet or Google Wallet in seven days.
Second, Active, shown as a count and a percentage of the total. By default, active means the customer visited in the last 14 days. This is the single most honest number on the screen, because it can't be inflated by history. A shop with 400 lifetime cards and 38 active customers is a smaller shop than one with 120 cards and 71 active.
Third, Slipping / at risk, labeled "Need a nudge". It adds two recency bands together: people 15 to 30 days out, and people 31 to 60 days out. These are regulars who haven't lapsed yet. They're the cheapest customers you will ever get back, and they're the reason to do this review at all.
Fourth, Avg cadence, in days, described on screen as "Between visits". If it reads 12 d, your typical returning customer comes back about every 12 days. This number moves slowly, which is exactly what makes a change in it meaningful. A worked example of a healthy week for a small cafe: 180 total customers, 96 active at 53 percent, 41 slipping or at risk, cadence steady at 12 days. Your own healthy numbers will differ by trade, and that's the point of writing them down weekly.
What the color bands mean, and how to change them
Waya sorts every customer into a recency band based on days since their last scan. Out of the box: Active up to 14 days, Slipping up to 30, At risk up to 60, Lapsed beyond that. A customer also counts as new until their third visit. In the customer list, each row shows a plain last-visit label such as Today, 1d ago, 23d ago, or Never visited.
Those thresholds are defaults, not verdicts. Open Customer health rules and you can drag them to fit your trade, with a live preview as you type. It matters more than it sounds. A laundry customer who hasn't come in 20 days is drifting away. A barber's client on a 4-week cut cycle at 20 days is perfectly normal, and flagging them as slipping just trains you to ignore the tile.
Set your bands once, in the first month, using what you already know about your own rhythm. If most regulars come weekly, tighten Active to 10 days. If you sell something people buy monthly, push it out to 35. The tile numbers only become useful after the bands describe your actual shop.
Three patterns that should make you change something
Pattern one: Total customers climbing, Active percentage falling. You're enrolling people who never come back a second time. That's almost never a card problem and almost always a counter problem. Staff are handing out the QR at checkout, then not scanning the same customer on the return visit, so the pass sits in the wallet at zero stamps forever. Watch one shift yourself before you change anything on the card.
Pattern two: the Slipping / at risk tile is larger than the Active tile. This is a recency problem, not an acquisition problem, and printing more posters will not fix it. Switch the Customers screen from Overview to Segments, pick the band you want, and use Message all. That pushes a notification to the lock screen of everyone in that band through their existing wallet pass. No SMS, no phone numbers leaving Waya, and no app for the customer to open. On the Free plan you get 100 of those messages a month, which is usually enough to cover one band, not four.
Pattern three: Avg cadence stretching while Total customers stays flat. Say it drifts from 12 days to 19 over a month. Your regulars are still yours, but they're spacing out, and nothing new is coming in to hide it. Look hard at the reward threshold first. A 10-stamp card in a shop with a 19-day cadence is a six-month wait for a free coffee, and people quietly stop counting. Cutting it to 6 stamps costs you less than losing the customer.
One pattern that is not a problem: a flat week during Ramadan, Eid, or the school holidays, when trading hours and household routines shift across Saudi Arabia. Compare this Ramadan to last Ramadan, not to the March before it.
What the dashboard cannot tell you
Waya has no POS integration and no hardware. The dashboard knows exactly what your staff scanned on a phone, and nothing else. If a customer buys three coffees and nobody scans their card, that visit does not exist in your numbers. Your weekly review is therefore also a review of whether your team is actually scanning.
It doesn't know your revenue either, unless you tell it. The Insights tab carries a Net from Waya tile in SAR, calculated after rewards and fees, but it only fills in once you've put a price on your card. Leave the price blank and the tile shows a prompt instead of a figure. Treat it as an estimate built on one average price, not as accounting.
Two more limits worth naming. The Customers by sex breakdown is guessed from first names and is labeled approximate on the screen, so use it for a rough sense of your mix and no more. And if you cross 100 customers on the Free plan, customer data locks until you upgrade. Nothing is deleted, existing cards keep collecting stamps, and access returns the moment you move to a paid plan.
When to open Insights instead
Once a month, give yourself twenty minutes on the Insights tab. Set the period chip to Last month and read three things: Daily activity, Busiest times, and Returning customers split into returning versus one-time. That's where scheduling decisions live.
Busiest times is the most immediately profitable card on the whole dashboard. It prints a sentence like "Usually Thursday around 9 PM". If your quiet hour is Sunday at 4 PM and your peak is Thursday at 9 PM, you now know which hour to staff up and which hour deserves an offer. Sending a wallet message into your existing peak mostly rewards people who were already coming.
Top customers, ranked by stamps and points, is the other one to read slowly. It's a short list of names you should recognize by face. If you don't recognize the top five, that is its own finding, and it's worth more than any chart on the page.
Frequently asked questions
Where do I see which customers stopped coming?
On the Customers tab, the third tile reads Slipping / at risk and counts everyone whose last visit falls outside your active window. By default that's customers 15 to 60 days out, split into a slipping band and an at-risk band. Switch the screen from Overview to Segments to see the actual names in each band, with each person's last-visit day count next to them.
Is the Waya dashboard available on the free plan?
The Customers tab and its four tiles work on the Free plan at 0 SAR, up to 100 customers. The Insights tab, with the daily activity chart, busiest times, and top customers, is part of the Growth plan at 85 SAR a month. If you pass 100 customers while on Free, customer data locks until you upgrade, but no cards or stamps are lost.
Does the Waya dashboard show how much money I made?
Not directly, because Waya has no POS or till integration and never sees your payments. The Insights tab shows a Net from Waya figure in SAR after rewards and fees, but only once you enter a price on your card, and it's an estimate based on that single average price. For real revenue, keep reading your POS or payment terminal reports.
How many days without a visit before a customer counts as lost?
Waya's defaults are 14 days for active, up to 30 for slipping, up to 60 for at risk, and lapsed beyond 60 days. You can change every one of those thresholds in Customer health rules, with a live preview, and the change applies instantly to the list, the donut, and the filters. Tune them to your trade, since a laundry's rhythm and a barber's four-week cut cycle are not the same shop.
Can I message the customers who went quiet without sending SMS?
Yes. In Segments mode on the Customers tab, each recency band has a Message all button that pushes a notification to the lock screen through the wallet pass the customer already has installed. No SMS is sent and no phone number is handed to a third-party messaging app. Free includes 100 messages a month, Growth includes 5,000, and Premium is unlimited.