There are fundamentally two types of information:

• records, which are specific “things”, such as Members, Vehicles, Events, Assets and so on.
• categories, which describe how you group your records. Most clubs will have a couple of different Membership Types, Vehicles might be classified as Original, Restored or Modified; Assets might be “Computer Equipment”, or “Merchandise”. For most categories, you can start with the default, suggested list of values, and adjust them as you see fit.

In this example, we are going to add a Membership Type. We’ve decided to introduce a “Family Membership” option.
Click on the Member Types link under the Categories menu item.

We’re now looking at the existing Membership Types, and whatever columns from the Show/Hide option we’ve adopted. We currently have "Member", "Associate Member" and "Honorary Life Member". Click on "Add a new Membership Type"

Labels in Red signify pieces of information that must be provided for this item to be valid. In this case, we need to provide a short description for the new item.

1. I’ve typed “Family Member” here, as that is what we call our new Membership Type.
2. This particular category also has optional values for Joining Fee and Renewal Fee, which I’ve also filled in.
3. To Save this new record, click the “Add” button.

All Add screens function in this way. If any items require a value and one hasn’t been supplied, or data of the wrong type is entered (such as text where a date belongs), the fields in question will be flagged in red for correction.
It’s also important to bear in mind that you cannot have two records for the same thing. If you already had a record labelled “Family Member” and you attempted to create another, you would get an error message alerting you to this fact.

Now, having clicked “Add”, we should see…

… the result, which is our freshly minted Membership Type. A few things to note about this screen:

1. A message appears beneath the menu bar reminding you that a new record was added.
2. Obviously, having just created this record, it has no related records. But once we create a new member and assign them Family Membership, this view screen will show that Person, as we looked at in the section on Navigation. NB: although you can create a new Member from here, it’s not the recommended, easiest way of doing that. See the next chapter.
3. Click on the "Add a new Membership Type" button again to add another record if required, or "List Membership Types" to show our new, slightly longer list of types.