Great news! There are many good things coming soon to increase your flexibility with Memberships and provide more features you've been asking for.

WHY is this Important: 
To be able to provide new and improved flexibility with your memberships, we need to ensure Expiration Dates and Renewal Months are populated correctly throughout the software. Many of the new features we are planning on implementing will utilize the membership’s Expiration Date (see where this is currently).

WHAT will be Changing? 
On October 8th the following updates will occur:

• Membership Expiration Dates will become a more visible. Learn More.
• Select members' Expiration Dates will get a one-time update to bring them to a current date. Learn More.
• The membership Renewal Month field will tie to your Expiration Date. Learn More.  

HOW does this Affect me?
There is no action required on your end, at this time. If you'd like to review/edit the the expiration date changes we are proposing for your database, we've created a screen to easily do this. See where to do this. Keep in mind, your processes won’t need to change on your end. This is because, currently, no actions occur in the software based off the Expiration date or Renewal Month. That said, you will start seeing Expiration Dates being more prevalent on membership screens. Should you choose to implement the upcoming features (listed below), you would have another chance at that time to review and update dates as needed.

Upcoming Features
Upcoming membership features (coming in late October):

• automatic expirations/drops
• grace period extension
• automatic renewal notification emails 
• and more!

Get a Look at the Improved Membership Details Screen:

After Oct 8th, you'll be able to click into your Contacts' Membership on the their Profile tab to see pertinent information spelled out in better detail.

GrowthZone Will do an Initial One-Time Update of Outdated Expiration dates

Due to the expiration date not being very visible or used much in the past, we know many of you have expiration dates that are not correct for your membership.  No worries! No action is required on your end to get updated.

On October 8th, we will perform a one-time update on older, out-of-date, out-of-range, expiration dates to a date that is likely your desired expiration date based on the information gathered from your membership.

Optional: Starting Sept. 19th, you will be able to view a list of the proposed updated expiration dates. See where to do this. Note: Not all expiration dates will be updated, only those that are outdated and don’t coincide with your billing.

If the proposed expiration date is not as you desire, you can easily correct them yourself before or after the update is run. You always have control over your expiration dates. See how to update your expiration dates.

Remember: No action occurs in the software based off the Expiration date; Expiration dates will be important when/if your association chooses to implement upcoming new features based on expiration date but at this time, the goal of this update is to make sure that expiration dates are not stale and unrealistically out-of-date. Should you choose to implement upcoming features, you would have another chance at that time to review and update dates as needed. 

Renewal Month Automatically Updated

The Renewal Month field on the Membership Details screen is a drop-down field that is initially set when a membership is brought in by the membership application or by the staff when manually adding a new membership. However, up until now, it has not continued to receive updates if a membership is changed to a different renewal period.

After October 8th, this field will update automatically for you; no longer do you need to manually update that field if membership information changes (if you've been one to manually keep this updated.) In addition, on October 8th, this field will be adjusted for existing memberships. It will automatically adjust the month to reflect the month representing the day after the membership expires.   See an example.

For instance, if the membership expires on 10/31/2019, then the Renewal Month will automatically be set to November, keeping this in line with how the renewal month was originally selected when memberships are created; it represents the first day of the membership period.

Remember, no action occurs in the software based on the Renewal Month field but it may have been used for grouping on your reports or viewed on the Memberships module.

FAQs

Q: If I want to enter my own expiration date, should I include grace period days in my date?
A: No. One of the upcoming features will allow you to enter a separate number of days for grace period that would be added to the end of your Expiration Date. So do not include any grace period days when entering your Expiration Dates.

Q: Do you have a suggestion for what I enter as my Expiration Date in conjunction with the Next Bill Date?
A: We suggest that customers have a Next Bill Date that is the first day of the new membership term. The Expiration date would then be 1 day prior to the Next Bill Date. For example, if the membership term begins on 1/1/2020, the Expiration Date would be 12/31/2019. The invoices can be created earlier than January of course, but it leaves the date on the invoice as January so that the revenue is associated with the correct membership period.