Choosing your club's membership renewal settings

If your club is new to Yacht Clubs Manager, one of the first money decisions your committee faces is how renewals should work. Choosing membership renewal settings is not technically difficult, but each choice changes what members receive and when, so it is worth agreeing them at committee rather than leaving them to whoever happens to open the settings page.

The most important thing to know first: everything automated is off by default. No renewal invoice is drafted, sent or chased, and no member is deactivated, until your club turns that on. You can start fully manual and switch things on one at a time as you gain confidence.

Decision one: a club renewal date or each member's anniversary

The first setting is when members renew. There are two options.

• The club renewal date. Everyone renews together on one date each year. The built-in default is 1 April, but you choose the day and month. New members who join part-way through the year can be charged pro-rata up to that date.
• Each member's own join date. Every member gets a full year from when they registered and renews on that anniversary. There is no club-wide date to set.

A shared date suits most clubs with a sailing season: the treasurer sees all the renewal income at once, the AGM can agree next year's subscriptions in good time, and "have you renewed?" means the same thing for everybody. Anniversary renewal spreads income and admin across the year, which suits clubs with a steady trickle of new members and no strong seasonal rhythm.

One practical point: if you choose the club date but haven't actually set it yet, the platform won't guess. New members fall back to their own anniversary, and pro-rata and club-date renewals are skipped, until the date is saved.

Decision two: pro-rata for new joiners

On a club renewal date, someone joining in September would otherwise get seven months of membership for nothing, or pay a full year for seven months. The Bill new members when they join setting invoices a new member pro-rata, by the day, for the time up to the next renewal date. It is off by default.

You can also set a minimum joining fee. If the pro-rata amount comes to less than that, it is waived, and the member is simply billed for their first full year at the next renewal. This avoids chasing someone for a trivial sum because they joined a week before the renewal date.

Members you bring across from an old system and mark as already paid for this year are never billed on joining, whatever this setting says. That is covered in moving members off spreadsheets.

Decision three: which automation to switch on

There are four separate pieces of renewal automation. Each runs as a daily job, and each does nothing until you enable it.

1. Renew automatically each year. When this is on for a member, next year's invoice is prepared as a draft ahead of their renewal date: 14 days ahead by default, and you can change the number of days. Nothing is sent or charged at this stage; the draft waits for you to review it. The club-wide setting applies to everyone, and you can adjust individual members afterwards.
2. Send renewal invoices automatically. With this on, each draft is emailed to the member on their renewal date without anyone pressing send. Invoices you create by hand are never sent automatically. If the club's Stripe account is not connected, drafts are held until it is.
3. Final warning. If you use deactivation, members who still haven't paid get a warning email 7 days before they would be deactivated.
4. Deactivate members who do not pay their renewal. Members still unpaid once the grace period has passed are set to inactive and emailed to tell them. The grace period, in days, only has an effect when this is switched on.

Deactivation only ever applies to members who were actually sent a renewal invoice. Someone whose membership has run out without ever being invoiced is never deactivated automatically; instead they are flagged to admins so the committee can decide what to do.

A sensible first year

For a club in its first renewal season on a new system, a cautious setup works well:

• Switch on automatic renewal, so the drafts are prepared for you. This saves the most work and carries no risk, because nothing leaves the building until you send it.
• Leave auto-send off for year one. Look through the drafts, check the amounts and membership types, then send them yourself in a batch. Once you have seen a full cycle come out right, turning auto-send on next year is an easy decision.
• Leave deactivation off until the committee has agreed a policy on non-payment and told members about it. Switching someone's membership off is a decision a club should make on purpose.

Separately from renewals, the invoice settings let you send one payment reminder a set number of days before an invoice falls due, and an email when it becomes overdue. These apply to all invoices, not just renewals.

How members pay a renewal

A renewal invoice is paid in one go. Members can pay the full amount by card from the invoice in the members area, and the invoice is marked paid as soon as the payment goes through, so card payers never need chasing or matching up. There is no Direct Debit and no option to split a subscription into instalments, so if your club has members who struggle with the annual amount, agree how the committee will handle that before the invoices go out.

Members who pay by bank transfer

Renewal invoices are not card-only. The invoice PDF carries your bank details, and a member who pays by transfer presses I've paid on the invoice to tell the club, optionally adding a reference. An admin is notified, checks the bank statement and records the payment. If you use deactivation, make sure whoever reconciles transfers does so promptly around the renewal date, so nobody is warned about a payment that has already arrived.

Writing it down

Whatever you choose, record it in the committee minutes and tell members before the renewal date: when they will receive their invoice, how they can pay, and what happens if they don't. Our membership renewal checklist covers the season-by-season steps, and the treasurer's guide to online invoicing covers the invoice side.

For the full picture of what invoices and payments can do, see invoicing and payments and member management.