HeyTaco Administrator Guide
A practical guide to launching HeyTaco and making the most of everything it can do — from your first taco to a full recognition and rewards program.
Launching HeyTaco
The best launches don't happen by accident — they're a little bit of planning and a lot of momentum. Here's how to set yours up right.
Get HeyTaco installed and in the right channels.
Add it to Slack or Microsoft Teams, pick a highly visible channel to start in (something like #shoutouts or #tacos works great), and give it access to any other channels or teams as you grow.
Pick a launch strategy that fits your team's size.
A company-wide launch works well under about 150 people or with strong leadership buy-in — think a big kickoff moment like "Taco Tuesday." Larger or more siloed organizations tend to do better with a phased rollout, proving it out with one team before expanding. Either way, the single biggest driver of a launch sticking is simple: whoever's driving adoption needs to personally give tacos away, regularly.
Use your first 30 days well.
There's a week-by-week trial guide that walks through seeding adoption, building social proof, introducing a ritual, and celebrating your first big milestone — it's a great structure to follow even outside a formal trial.
Get the basics set up before you announce it.
Make sure you know who your admin is (it defaults to whoever installs HeyTaco, and you can add more anytime), decide on a daily taco limit if you want something other than the default of 5, and add people ahead of time if you'd rather not wait for everyone's first taco.
- Admin roles: who is our admin, and how do we add more?
- Adding people to HeyTaco
- Adjusting daily taco limits
Teaching your team about HeyTaco
People get the gist about HeyTaco pretty quickly, but a user guide never hurt anyone :) There are downloadable PDF guides for both Slack and Teams you can share with your team or post on your intranet, plus demo videos if you'd rather show people than send them a doc.
Giving & Receiving Recognition
The core of HeyTaco is simple: tag a coworker, write a message, add a 🌮. But there's more than one way to give, and knowing the options helps recognition feel natural rather than routine.
The basics.
Tag someone's @username , say why you're grateful, and include the taco emoji — that's a taco given. You can recognize more than one person in a single message, and each person mentioned gets the full amount.
Taco Reactions make giving even faster (Slack only).
Once an admin turns this on, reacting to any message with 🌮 gives a taco to whoever's mentioned — no need to write a new message when someone's already said it well.
Know where tacos can (and can't) go.
Tacos only work in channels, not direct messages, though private channels in Slack and private teams in MSTeams both support giving. On Slack, private-channel tacos are tracked but the message stays out of the public activity feed by default — admins can change that.
Use Taco Tags to connect recognition to your values.
Adding a hashtag like #ownership or #teamwork to a taco message ties that moment of recognition to something bigger — and over time, the Tags page shows you which values are actually getting celebrated.
Let admins add extra recognition where it's earned.
Bonus tacos are a great way to reward things that don't happen in the flow of daily work — wellness challenges, certifications, referrals, company milestones. Bonus tacos can be given by admins only and are added to people's redeemable taco balance, which they can use for rewards in the Taco Shop.
Make it easy for people to dial in their own experience.
Notifications are managed per person, so encourage your team to set them up in a way that keeps HeyTaco feeling like a nice surprise, not noise.
Stickers, Levels, and Other Ways to Keep It Fun
Once giving feels natural, these features add a layer of delight that keeps people engaged.
Stickers give your more tacos to give (Slack only) — without touching your daily taco limit. There are 8 of them, from a one-person Taco Trophy to Taco Confetti, which gives everyone in the channel a taco. They're a great way to celebrate a team win or give extra credit where it's due.
Tacotars and Levels give people something to work toward.
Tacotars are a set of 50 collectible avatars unlocked as milestones in someone's HeyTaco journey (Slack only); Levels are an uncapped progression that works on both platforms and just keeps climbing with activity.
The leaderboard is more flexible than it looks.
You can filter by given, received, or combined, by timeframe, and by channel or team — and if you'd rather keep the focus on generosity instead of who's "winning," Giver Mode flips the leaderboard to show only who's giving the most. And you can always turn off all leaderboards if you'd like.
A quick reminder as you think about all of this: HeyTaco is built to celebrate everyday moments of gratitude, not to rank or evaluate individual performance — that's what keeps it feeling like a genuine "thank you" instead of a scoreboard.
Milestones: Celebrating Birthdays and Anniversaries Automatically
Milestones takes one thing entirely off your plate: remembering everyone's birthday and work anniversary. Once it's set up, HeyTaco handles the shoutout — you just get to make it feel personal.
Set it up once, and it runs itself.
Choose a celebration channel, pick which milestones to celebrate, and set your message templates and taco amounts. HeyTaco sends birthday messages around 9:30 AM and anniversary messages around 10:00 AM, in each person's own time zone.
Make the messages feel like yours.
Templates are fully customizable, and each person gets to choose whether their milestone is celebrated publicly, privately, or not at all.
A few ideas for making milestones land even better.
Encourage personal notes or photos alongside the automated message, pair a birthday or anniversary with a small reward, or start a recurring team ritual (a virtual lunch, a GIF tradition) around celebrations.
Rewards & The Taco Shop
This is where tacos turn into something tangible — and it's worth waiting until recognition is already flowing before you introduce it, so rewards feel like a bonus rather than the whole point.
Start here if you're setting up rewards for the first time.
There are three reward types — Custom, Collaborative, and Gift Cards — and picking the right mix matters more than picking the "best" one.
Custom rewards are anything you create and fulfill yourself — swag, an extra day off, lunch with leadership. You can even set up dynamic quantities for things that come in variants, like sizes or colors, so one reward tile tracks inventory for every option.
Collaborative rewards let the whole team pool tacos toward something shared — a charity donation, a team outing — which tends to build more excitement than any single-person reward can.
Gift cards are the lowest-effort reward to run, since HeyTaco fulfills them automatically — no admin follow-through required. Thousands of options across 100+ countries, and the prepaid Mastercard is a great catch-all for a globally distributed team. (Gift cards are a Deluxe feature.)
Pricing and budgeting rewards well makes a real difference in how the Taco Shop feels. A good starting ratio is 4 tacos per $1 of value, and building a few reward tiers (low, mid, and aspirational) gives everyone something to work toward. Don't skip the free stuff, either — a coffee with the CEO often gets more excitement than something expensive.
Redeeming rewards for your teammates is super straightforward, plus they can alway see their redemption status and history in their individual profile.
Reporting & Analytics
Once HeyTaco's been running for a bit, these tools help you see what's actually working — and make the case for what to do next.
Recognition and Rewards reports give you a live, real-time view of your taco economy: total tacos given, engagement rate, top givers and receivers, which values (tags) are getting recognized most, and which rewards people are actually redeeming. (Available on Deluxe.)
Download the underlying data anytime — taco activity, people balances, redemption history, and gift card funding are all exportable from their respective admin pages, useful for deeper analysis or year-end reporting.
Plans That Grow With You
Classic ($3/person/month) covers the core experience — giving, the leaderboard, and the Taco Shop with custom and collaborative rewards. Deluxe ($5/person/month) adds instant gift cards, Milestones automation, and advanced analytics. You can switch between plans anytime, and if you only want to pay for part of your organization, a Team subscription lets you scope billing to a specific group rather than the whole workspace where people get added automatically when they give or receive a taco.