Clubs and associations either renew everyone on a rolling basis based on the date that they joined the organization or on the same date. The first option (“rolling renewals”) works for all membership durations, not just multiples of 12 months. So if you have 3- or 4- or 6-month memberships, select this option.
When you select this choice, a new option will appear to control expiration dates when a member renews and pays:
These choices only apply if the membership has expired when the member pays. If the membership is still active when the member pays, the new expiration date will be the old expiration date PLUS the duration. There are three choices:
- Select the first choice if the new expiration date should be based on the date when the member renewed, even if he or she paid later. This has been the traditional ClubExpress behavior.
- Select the second choice if the new expiration date should be based on the date when the member paid. If this is the same date as the renewal, it behaves as the first choice. If it’s a later date, the expiration date will be that date plus the duration. With this option, members may “lose” a few days or months between when their membership expired and when it was renewed.
- Select the third choice if the new expiration date should be based on the old expiration date plus the duration, even if the member renewed and/or paid some time later. With this option, members cannot advance their expiration date by stretching when they renew and pay; it will always be their original signup date plus the duration.
Note that these options also apply to new memberships. If the second option is chosen, the new member expiration date will be their date of payment plus duration; otherwise it will be their date of signup plus duration.
If “same date” is selected, a different set of options will appear:
The start month of the cycle must be specified. The date is assumed to be the first of the month.
Some organizations offer a grace period if someone joins a short time before the renewal date.
If everyone renews on January 1st, some groups will allow new members who join in November to receive a slightly extended membership for the first year (for example, 14 months; without this option, no one would join near the renewal date!) If you provide such a grace period, click Yes and specify the number of months up to 10.
Note that “same-date” renewals don’t work with durations that are not a factor of 12 (1, 2, 3, 4, 6, 12, 24, etc.)
ClubExpress will not correctly calculate an expiration date for a member type with duration of 5 months.
For “same-date” renewals and durations of less than 12 months, ClubExpress divides the year into periods of 12 divided by the duration.
Example: If a member type has a 4-month duration, the year is divided into three segments (Jan-Apr, May-Aug, and Sep-Dec.) If a member renews at any time in May, June, July or August, his or her new expiration date will be August 31st.
When everyone renews on the same date, you also have an additional option to enforce continuous membership. This is similar to the option described on the previous page for membership based on the join date.
When this option is set to Yes, expired members who try to renew will only see member types that put their new expiration date in the future.
Assume a club with a calendar based membership year and it’s now May 2013. Someone whose membership expired on 12/31/2012 will see 12 and 24 month member types but someone whose membership expired on 12/31/2011 will only see the 24 month (or longer) member types (since a 12 month member type would leave them still as an expired member.)
Finally, if all members renew on the same date, you can enable proration. Select Yes to apply a prorated fee to calculate a prorated fee for newly joining members based on the date they first sign up. For group memberships, proration applies to each member individually, not to the total. Only memberships charges (membership dues and subgroup fees) are included in the fee proration, not Additional Charges (for example, an additional donation added, a club coffee mug, etc.) are not reduced in price.
Proration rounds membership charges up to the nearest dollar. For example, if your membership charge is $84.75, the resulting charge will be for $85.00.
Proration only applies to new membership signups and will never be applied to a membership renewal.