To begin managing your Association, create an Association profile including the Membership rules. The initial rules you define for each Member Type in your Association Profile are only guidelines. When you create your Association, the initial values you specify for your Member Type become the default values for each Member Type other users create for this Association. Any user can easily change the default values as needed.
Note that fields in bold in netFORUM are required fields. Complete all required fields in order to save your Association.
To add a new Association to netFORUM, follow these steps:
The first section of Association Setup deals with naming your association in the Association Set-Up Information section. Both fields in this section are required fields.
Set up the Association, as follows:
Field Name | Required? | Description |
---|---|---|
Association Code | Required | Your association code is normally the acronym for your association. |
Association | Required | This field will contain the full name of your association. |
Membership Dates Information Section - This section of Association Setup enables you to dictate how a member's join date is handled and what invoice types your association will create for handling membership dues.
Field Name | Required? | Description |
---|---|---|
Update Dates: | Required |
When a member joins or updates his or her membership to your association, you need to decide how the membership dates are updated within netFORUM. You do this through the value you assign in the update dates drop-down field. Depending upon what value you enter here, the member's join, effective, and expiration membership dates are affected accordingly as described below:
|
Percent Paid | Optional | This field is used in addition with the update dates dropdown when you use percent paid as a value. Use percent paid field to dictate what percent must be paid by the member before the membership dates are updated. |
Invoice Type | Required |
A drop-down field that specifies what type of invoices you want your association to generate when dealing with memberships. Specifically:
|
Grace Period | Optional | This field enables you to specify a period of time that you would like to give members to pay their dues beyond their expiration date while keeping their membership status set to active. The grace period is the time period after a membership expires and before a payment is made. During this time the member continues to receive benefits. When the grace period is up, if the member has not renewed, the membership will be cancelled after the membership drop membership process has been run. |
set customer member flag? : | Optional |
Select this checkbox if you would like to set the Member Flag to true once the update dates terms have been met.
Note: This means that the receives member benefitscheckbox is also set to true for each member added to this Association and that each member will receive all member benefits defined in the dues package. |
The next section in Association Setup enables you to specify how a member will pay dues. The two options available are based on a member's anniversary date or by calendar year. As mentioned previously, the values entered in this section are only default values for your Association and are added so that they can be referenced 'at a glance'. Once your Association is in place, you will define the concrete Memberships and Member Types that belong to your Association that will vary from type to type and, as such, will take precedence over the information entered here.
Note: For the purposes of revenue recognition, the start date for prorated subscriptions occurs on the first day of the subscription term, not the date of the invoice.
Anniversary-based dues begin the month a person joins and end the same month a year later (or if it is a two-year membership, the same month, two years later). Anniversary dues cannot be prorated.
To set up anniversary-based dues:
Calendar-based dues are memberships that run for 12 months (e.g., January through December). Calendar-based dues may be prorated.
To set up calendar-based dues:
To set up a start date for either dues type: