Prorating membership dues for new applications

Membership dues usually correspond to a certain period (duration) of membership - for example, 1 year.

Some organizations base membership period on join date - meaning that new members can join at any time and their membership will be 1 year from the join date and renewed annually on that date. Other organizations use specific date-based membership, for example from January 1st to December 31st and all members renew on the same date. (In Wild Apricot selection of join date / specific date membership is set in each membership level).

For fixed-date memberships an important consideration is how to deal with members that join in the middle of the current membership period - and this is where prorating comes in.

Prorating is adjusting the membership dues for new members for their first membership period proportionally according to the actual remaining time. Wild Apricot provides a way to automatically prorate base membership fee as well as certain extra costs (See Dynamic membership pricing fields)

For example, if your annual membership fee is $120 and your membership period is fixed to January 1st to December 31st and someone joins on June 10th, Wild Apricot can automatically adjust their membership fee to $70 (June-December).
In addition, for people who join very close to the next renewal date you can set Wild Apricot to simply sign them up for the next renewal period. Continuing the example below, if somebody joins on December 5th 2010, even though current membership period (Jan 1st 2010 - Dec 31st 2010) is still active, you can have Wild Apricot automatically extend their membership period from Dec 5th 2010 to Dec 31st 2011 (instead of Dec 31st 2010).

Membership level settings

Automatic prorating can be activated for any membership level set to use specific date in their Renewal period

At the moment, prorating cannot work together with automatic recurring payments.

You can set up your prorating periods under the New applications tab on the Membership level details. If your membership level settings allows prorating, you will see the following options

• Automatically prorate fee/selected costs - (round up to nearest day/month) - Define at what point in time that the membership application fee should start to be prorated. This can be done in terms of either days or months.
• Charge full regular fee AND extend renewal by one additional period - Any application submitted in this time frame will pay the full membership fee, but they will not have to renew their membership until the next period after the current one. This can be done in terms of either days or months.

Prorating extra cost fields

For each extra cost field you can define whether it should be pro-rated as well via field customization screen. For example, if new members can get a t-shirt with your logo, that field probably would not be set to prorate - because they are getting the t-shirt whether their first membership period is full 12 months or just 7 months. On the other hand, if you use extra costs field to adjust membership dues (e.g. based on # of employees in member organization), that field should be prorated.

Application form

When applying for a membership level whose cost is being prorated, the applicant is notified of the prorated cost when selecting their level, as well as on each screen of the application process.

Invoices/Receipts

Application fees and costs which have been prorated are shown on the invoice. There will be a line which details the full fee or extra cost, and then a line where this is prorated via a discount.

There is an outside chance that the prorating might lead to a fee that is zero, or so close to it as to essentially be free. Please note that to avoid this and the complications that can arise from it, all pro-rated amounts are always rounded up to 0.01

Calculation examples

Here are a couple of example that help to explain how the prorating settings work. These both apply to a level with the following settings:

• Membership fee: $120
• Renewal period: Annual, starting on 1st of June.

Automatically prorate fees/selected costs

This level has been set up so that memberships submitted 6 months before the next renewal date are prorated. The application is being paid online, and is submitted on January 1st. Since the application has been submitted 5 months before the renewal date, the following steps occur

1. The membership is broken down to a monthly rate, in this case 120/12 = $10. (If it were set to days, then the fee would be divided by the day 120/365 = $0.33)
2. The fee is rounded up to the nearest month, which means that the applicant will be charged for 5 months. If they had applied later, say on the 1st of May, they would be charged for 1 month. In this case, they are charged for the number of months multiplied by the monthly prorated fee - 5 X $10 = $50.

Charge full fee and extend renewal

This level has been set up so that memberships submitted within 30 days of the renewal date are to be charged the full amount and have their renewal period extended. The application is being paid online, and is submitted on May 21st, 2010. Since the application has been submitted within the 30 day window before the renewal date, the following steps occur

1. The member is charged the full amount for the membership level - $120.
2. Their renewal date will be set to June 1st, 2012. If this had not been set their renewal date would be June 1st, 2011.

Notes

If a membership level has a prorating period set up and the Administrator either

• Creates a member for that level OR
• Changes a member's membership level and sets their status to Pending-New

The following will happen:

1. The application will be prorated according to the rules that have been defined (but selected extra charges will not be prorated).
2. There will be no "Prorated" label applied to this transaction on the Transaction list.

The Charge full regular fee AND extend renewal by one additional period setting will work as described if the renewal date is left empty. After changing status from Pending-New to Active renewal date will be set to the next period.