Setting up fees

After you identify the fees that you want to charge a member who joins, log in as a SysAdmin and do the following:

1. Go to Settings > Groups > Types to review the Group Type called Primary Membership. Verify that the roles and statuses are what you need for your membership group. For our simple case, we will use roles of Regular and Student, and statuses of Active and Inactive.

🚧 Warning

The Primary Membership group type must have Single Role selected. If this option is not selected, it will cause errors when running renewals.

2. Go to Settings > Commerce > Product classes to review the settings for your Product Class for the class you intend to use for dues products: usually, the Billing and Subscriptions class. Verify that the settings (especially the default GL accounts) are correct, since these will become the default values for each dues product you create.

📘 Note

Do not make any changes to the Unit of Measure area, that is not supported yet and those settings must remain unchanged.

📘 Note

Do not change the tax settings without reviewing documentation on how to set up proper taxation for your country.

1. Go to Community > Add group to create a group that represents membership in your organization. When creating the group:
   • Group type: usually the Primary Membership group type is used, but that is not required. If you choose another group type, be sure to select one that is date-limited.
   • Is Member: Select this checkbox option, which makes members of this group eligible for discount price for products or events.
2. Create a Join now product for members to purchase online. Note that you can create a product collection that allows users to pick from several membership options.
   • Go to Commerce > Add product to create one simple product for each fee to be charged. In our example, that's one product for Regular members, another for Student members.

     📘 Note

     Discount prices do not currently apply to dues products; only the Standard price is used for joins.

   • Check Assign purchaser to a group, and select the group you created in the previous step.

   📘 Note

   Assign the correct role to each product. Use a naming convention in the Product Code field to distinguish between simple products, product collections, and sets of collections. For example, prefixing simple product codes with S_, collections with C_ and series with S_ lets you see at a glance which products are the collections versus the simple products contained within a collection.

   • Review the Accounting tab to ensure that the desired settings apply. The selected Accounting method determines the following:

   Income is accounted for when sale occurs.	Income is accounted for when payment is made.
   Purchaser is active member of group as soon as the invoice is issued.	Purchaser is not active member of group until invoice is paid.
   Invoice will appear on: Invoice Journal Entries tab - Journal Entry will appear under Sales Journal AR Statement AR Trial Balance GL Journal Reports	Invoice will appear on: Invoice Journal Entries tab - No Journal Entry under Sales Journal AR Statement (optional)

3. (optional) Create a product collection that presents your two join products as a choice.
   • Create a collection of items shown separately and individually priced.
     • Item Set Properties: Select the Customer must select only one component option to create a pick-one type of collection.
     • Item Set Components: Use the add link to add each of the choices, regular or student, one at a time to the item set. Select the order in which you want them to be displayed, and indicate which should be the default choice.
   • Review the Accounting settings for the collection. Fields that can be edited here will override the individual simple products' settings.
   • Typically if you create a collection, then you don't want to show the individual products for Student or Regular in your list of products. To indicate that these products can only be sold as part of the collection and not individually:
     1. Go to Settings > Commerce > Manage products.
     2. Retrieve each simple product you created.
     3. Enable Can only be purchased within a collection of items then click Save. After a short delay, the simple products will no longer appear in the Shop list.
4. Go to Community > Find groups to set up your join policy and renewal policies. Select the group and click the pencil icon to edit the group.
5. Select the Start Policy, or accept the default which uses actual join date.
6. Set up a renewal policy:
   1. Check the box for Group Membership is subject to renewal billings.
   2. In the table for renewal products, add one line per role in this group.

   📘 Note

   Assign a renewal product individually for each role, or else members with that role will not be billed for renewals.

   📘 Note

   Do not use the All Roles option when creating a renewal policy.

7. In the simplest case, fees are the same for joining and for renewing, so you can use the same simple products for both the join and the renew tasks. In our example, you would add a line for role Member that uses product S_Regular, and a line for role Student that uses product S_Student.
8. If the fees after initial join are lower, you must create separate products:
   1. Create a separate product for each renewal, such as S_RegularRenew and S_StudentRenew.
   2. Enable Can only be purchased within a collection of items to keep them out of your Shop list.
   3. Assign those products as the renewal products for each role in the Group Renewal Policy.

This section discusses the use of a more complex product collection, when joining confers membership in more than one group. An example of this might be if you charge an optional fee for the member’s choice of either of two association journals when they join, which provides them with a 1-year subscription. In this case, purchasing the Join product makes that contact a member in both the association membership group, and in the group for one of the journals.

1. Create groups for Our Association Members, Monthly Journal and Quarterly Journal. The group type for journals typically would be Subscriptions. It must be date-limited.
2. Create all the simple products first: Regular member (product code S_Regular), Student member (S_Student), Monthly Journal (S_JournalMthly) and Quarterly Journal (S_JournalQtrly).
   • For each simple product, be sure to assign the appropriate group and role to be assigned upon purchase.
   • Hide the Regular and Student products (enable Can only be purchased within a collection of items), but don’t hide the journals, so that nonmembers can still shop and purchase a subscription.
3. In order to make users select one of the member types, we need a collection: Create a collection for product C_SelectType, with the components S_Regular and S_Student.
4. Because we ultimately will create a series of collections as our Join product, we need to also create a collection for C_JournalSubscriptions, with components S_JournalMonthly and S_JournalQtrly simple products.

📘 Note

This collection would be required EVEN IF there were only a single journal being offered, because when you create a series of collections, you cannot add simple products or kits to it; a series can only contain collections of simple products.

1. Now create a series-of-collections product SS_JoinToday, which contains the C_SelectType and C_Journal collections.

When a new contact purchases the SS_JoinToday product, they are added to the membership group and to the group for the journal they have selected, for a 1-year term. At the end of that term, the renewal process will bill them based on the fees in the renewal product for any groups that are expiring. You must choose one of these renewal strategies:

• Use a separate renewal procedure for each product (recommended):
  1. Set up the renewal policy for the association group so that role Regular uses product S_Regular, and role Student uses renewal product S_Student.
  2. Set up the renewal policy for the Monthly Journal group so that role Subscriber uses renewal product S_JournalMthly, and the Quarterly Journal group renews role Subscriber to product S_JournalQtrly.
  3. Association staff generate the renewal billings once each month for each group, which generates one invoice for each separate group renewal.
  1. Once the renewal batches are posted, the user will see the Renew Membership button appear on their Account page, and with a single click, all renewal invoices can be placed in their cart for payment.
• Use a single renewal procedure for all products:
  1. Your renewal policy for the association membership group would need one renewal product for Regular members (consisting of a collection containing products S_Regular, S_JournalQtryly and S_JournalMonthly), and a separate renewal product for Student members (consisting of a collection containing products S_Student, S_JournalQtryly and S_JournalMonthly).
  2. Each renewed member will only be billed the fees for products that are tied to groups of which they are already a member, so we can include both journals in the renewal product collection.
  3. When association staff generate the renewal for the association membership group, the rules in the article titled Renewal Processing Rules will be applied, generating a single invoice for each member of the association membership group, effectively billing for the renewal of their member fees and for renewal of any subscriptions to either journal.
  1. Journals will also be billed only if the subscription is due to renew.

📘 Note

It is still important to run a monthly renewal for each group, and to run the association membership renewal before running renewals for the journals. Any contacts who subscribe to the journals but are not association members will only be renewed when you process renewals for the journal groups. If the renewal is run for the journal before the association membership, then the journals will be renewed first in one invoice, and they will no longer be due when the association membership renewal is run, resulting in a separate invoice for the association dues.

Set up the renewal invoicing and billing process to efficiently bill for term-based items, such as dues and subscriptions. Depending on your organization’s needs, you can:

• Define start and end date rules and billing cycles.
• Assign renewal billing schedule and prices by group role.
• Define a set of mandatory and optional products for the join process and a subset for renewal billing.
• Display a Renew link on a user’s account page when a user with outstanding renewal invoices logs in.
• Record payments.