Tag Archives: member-status

Membership Type and Membership Status

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An area that does cause some confusion with new users of OurCarClub is the difference between Membership Type and Membership Status.

Membership Status

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Regardless of the type of membership, each member has to pay their fees or risk having their membership lapse. (Unless they’re a Life Member, of course.) The OurCarClub system keeps a history of annual renewals, knowns as "Subs", or Subscriptions.

As a result, Membership Status is a derived value – you cannot enter it directly, it is determined from the currency of the member’s most recent Subscription. It is displayed in the Member List and Member View pages to make your life easier, but you cannot directly edit it.

  • Once the end-date of a member’s most recent renewal has passed, their Status will change from Current to Expiring.
  • Once the end-date is more than your club’s "grace period" days ago, the Status will change from Expiring to Lapsed.

See the section on New Sub End Date and Grace Period for more information.

NB: When loading historical data (records of past, not current members) into your OurCarClub system, an "Historical Data" membership-type can be created for you if you wish. However, it isn’t really necessary, unless there are no records of what kind of Membership these historical members had.

Membership Type

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Each club can define their own list of Membership Types, and/or load the default set. Typical examples of Membership Types are:

  • Full Member
  • Social Member
  • Family Membership
  • Associate Member
  • Honorary Life Member
  1. The Membership Type must be unique – you cannot have two Membership Types both called "Member".
  2. Each type will have a Joining Fee (the amount charged on initially joining the club) and a Renewal Fee (the amount charged on renewing. These are entered as numbers – don’t try to include a ‘$’ sign. If there’s no difference between Joining and Renewal Fee in your club, just put the same amount in both fields.
  3. As with many pages that show a category item, a list of People in that category is shown to the right.

Generally speaking, although a member could change their membership type from one renewal to the next, it is something that only happens occasionally, e.g. Social Member becomes Full Member, or Full Member receives Honorary Life Membership. Notice that "Lapsed" or "ex-Member" do not appear in this list. This is by design. You should not create Membership Types for this purpose.

Showing Lapsed Members

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By default, the Members List is limited to only Current Members. However, information about lapsed members is still in the database, and you can toggle whether you want to display lapsed members or not using the button with the spanner, as pictured.

This setting remains in force until you change it back, or you log out.

The ability to access lapsed members is useful if they subsequently rejoin, or if you have need to contact them. It also provides an auditable history of membership.

Adding a New Member

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There’s a lot of information that can be captured when adding a new member to your database.

Understanding the Add Screen

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Although this is a very busy screen, it has everything required to add a new member into the system in a very short space of time, which means it can be done at a club meeting, if you have a computer (laptop, tablet etc) with internet access. Your new member can confirm for you that the details are correct, so you don’t have to try and decipher their handwriting a day or two later!

1. The next Member Number in sequence is automatically suggested.
2. Bold Red labels show attributes which are required, plain black labels are optional information.
3. Home and Workplace Suburb/State/Postcode are automatically suggested for you
4. Record this new member’s initial fees info, method of payment and receipt number.
5. Include their vehicle data. Again, Make/Model/Bodystyle are suggested for you from your Categories info, but can be overridden. Similarly, Vehicle Colour & Trim are suggested from your existing data once you type a couple of characters. (You can choose to record all the official Colour Codes and Descriptions for the model vehicles your club is dedicated to, if you wish. You can just enter "Blue", or you can leave it as Not Recorded if you’re not interested in recording this information.

Adding a New Member (continued)

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1. An example of the Make/Model/Body suggested text to describe the Vehicle
2. All Date fields have a Calendar control "widget" to select dates (and times, where appropriate).
3. When you’re finished, click Add. Any essential columns that are empty or invalid will be highlighted for correction, or you’ll go straight to the Member View page for this newly created record.

Adding a New Member (continued) Correcting Missing Info

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Note the highlighted text-boxes showing fields that require information that has not been provided.

Annual Renewal Time

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Most clubs have a date when all members’ renewals fall due. Usually, the club meeting at this time is very busy for the Treasurer, processing many members’ payments. Similarly, there may be lots of direct deposits on the bank statement to be entered into the system.
OurCarClub has a specialised version of the Member List page to handle this, for small to medium sized clubs. More instructions for large clubs can be found at the end of this article.

Processing Bulk Renewals

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At the bottom of the Member List is a button labelled "Process Renewals". Click that to continue.

Processing Bulk Renewals (continued.)

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The usual features of a list screen are available – you can use the Search and sort functions to quickly find a particular individual. Note that only members with Expiring Status appear on this version of the page. You may also notice that the save button is disabled on all rows initially. This is to ensure that we don’t accidentally process the wrong record.

In this example we’re going to renew Ellie-May Clampett’s membership.

  1. Choose the payment method from the drop-down. This selection triggers the enabling of the Save button at the right, since all the other fields are optional.
  2. The amount field defaults to the Renewal Amount for this Member’s Membership Type. It can be overridden if neessary.
  3. The payment date defaults to today.
  4. If you issue a paper receipt from a receipt book, you can record the number here
  5. This checkbox is enabled if this member has an email address listed. In that case a receipt for this payment will be automatically emailed to the member. If the member does not have an email address, you can still check this box, in which case the receipt will be emailed to you, allowing you to print and post it if necessary.
  6. For processing direct deposit or credit card payments, and transaction ID associated with the payment can be recorded here.
  7. Once the payment type has been selected at (1), the Save button is enabled. Click it, and the renewal process will commence in the background. You can continue to process the next member.

When a renewal process completes, the "Payment Method" dropdown is replaced by a short message to alert you to the result.

Bulk Renewals for Large Clubs, and handling Individual Renewals

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Because the customised List View shown above presents all expiring members on a single page, for very large clubs this can lead to very long lists, and responsiveness of the page can decline as a result. An alternative is to use the Quick Search feature under the Member menu item to quickly locate the relevant member (or ex-member), and be taken to their Member View page.

Quick Renewal for a Single Member

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The “Subs” panel has a tab labelled “Renewal” that provides quick access to entering details of the renewal.

  1. If the member is in “Expiring” or “Lapsed” status, the Renewal Tab will be front-most. If they are a current member, it will be behind the “Current” and “Previous” tabs.
  2. Choose the type of payment from the drop-down list. The pre-populated amount is based on the “Renewal Fee” setting for this member’s Membership Type. You can override it if required. Similarly, the date paid field is prepopulated with today’s date, but can be changed.
  3. The Receipt Number and Transaction ID fields can be entered if they’re relevant. For example, you might want to record a Cheque Number, Postal Order Number or other identifying information to cross reference this payment against other information. Both of these fields are optional.
  4. An emailed receipt can be automatically generated and sent to the member. If the member has an email address recorded, this checkbox will be checked by default. If (as is the case in this example) the member does not have an email address, the prompt will read “Email Receipt to yourself”, and will NOT be checked by default. This allows you to receive the receipt email to print and post it.

When you’ve completed this renewal, click on the Members quick-search to locate the next renewing member.

You can expedite the process still further by turning on the Process Renewals mode, which can be found in the Members menu.

 

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Turning Process Renewals mode on changes the behaviour of the Member View page. Instead of the usual action, it opens in Edit view, but with the Subs panel also available. This allows you to make changes to address details of the member and process their renewal with far fewer clicks. Turning the mode off again can be done using the same approach.