When you prepare renewal reminders in renewals → renewal reminders, we now alert you to any memberships which you would include but seem not to have paid at all for the previous year (or whatever payment frequency).
Contents
Background
Usually, you would expire members who don’t renew, at some point not too long after their expiry date. You would do this:
- For manual payments, in renewals → overdue manual renewals. That detects them simply by their expiry date being too long ago. You would usually advance that date by processing their manual renewal.
- For automated payments, in accounting tasks → overdue automated payments. That detects them by seeing that you have no payment attributed (reconciled) to them, after a reasonable period.
However, if this has been overlooked so that membership has been allowed to continue, renewal reminders treats them like any other current member. In particular, advancing expiry date as a side-effect of sending renewal reminders for automated payments perpetuates the problem. From the members’ point of view it looks like they have paid. They may not realise their automated payments stopped (non-renewal may not be their fault).
Alert for non-payment
To avoid this problem, before sending reminders, we alert you to non-payment for the previous year (or whatever payment frequency you set for membership type). If there are none, you should not notice any difference when preparing reminders.
We actually look for payments from a short while before their last renewal was due, up to their current expiry date. For annual payment frequency, this preceding period is two months. So we look for subscription payments in the fourteen months preceding their expiry date. This is because people often pay before their renewal date – especially in response to reminders set a short time in advance of expiry.
When we find any of these, we list them for you (Fig 1). We won’t then normally send further reminders or advance renewal date for any of these. However, you have the option to override this if necessary. This might arise, for example, if someone has an unusual payment history, such as paying for membership a long time in advance of it being due.
You can also:
- select errant memberships for further investigation.
- look at payment histories
We ignore free memberships and indefinite (life) memberships when looking for non-payment.