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If your organisation have memberships then the answer is almost certainly: Yes!
Membership Extras is designed to overcome many challenges that prevent CiviCRM from being a great membership management system.
Whilst CiviCRM allows you to have memberships that can have different durations (eg. monthly, annual, lifetime) CiviCRM doesn’t support actual payment by instalments. This is where an organisation will want to offer a membership that has a different duration to the payment duration. For example an annual membership that is paid in monthly or quarterly instalments. With Membership Extra’s you can!
CiviCRM’s default handling of members being in “arrears” only supports a few use cases (specifically where members either do not renew at all) or where they do not pay before a grace period elapses. In order to really support payment by instalments we have extended the membership status rules, to also be able to change the status of a membership when a payment relating to the membership is overdue, so you can track members in arrears (and email them automatically!) before finally ending their membership benefits.
CiviCRM currently only records a single start date and end date for each membership throughout full history of the membership. Each period of membership, when it starts and ends are not accounted for.
With Membership Extras, any membership sign-up or renewal will create a new membership period recording the effective duration of the sign-up or renewal. You can expand any membership record to see all the period records including their start date, end date and status.
There will also be some enhancement shipped with this feature to allow better automated control over the benefit delivery for membership.
This will allow staff to modify a members benefits during the current membership period - upgrading, downgrading or adding add-ons as needed. These will all flow through as part of the same billing order as the previous membership - i.e. as part of the same recurring contribution and hence will all be kept on the same invoice. This will lower transaction costs for organisations and tidy up billing processes.
CiviCRM has support for many payment processors, including several Direct Debit payment processors. With these “online” payment processors, when the membership comes to renew, the logic is actually managed by the payment processor in order to renew the membership and take next years payment. CiviCRM doesn’t however have any functionality for memberships where the payment is “offline” i.e. some Direct Debit processes or where you invoice clients in advance of receiving the payment. With Membership extras CiviCRM now fully supports offline automated renewal including sending email notifications with invoices for payment. We also have created a new offline batch direct debit export module which allows for full management of high volume direct debits through export processes.
Membership Extras is designed to work with CiviCRM 4.7.x or 5.x plus. If you are on an earlier version of CiviCRM, you will need to upgrade your site first or contact [email protected] if you needs assistance to do so.
If your CiviCRM is already on CiviCRM 4.7.x or 5.x plus and this is the first time you use an extension, please see Here for full instructions and information on how to set and configure extensions.
You can get the latest release of Membership Extras from CiviCRM extension directory page or our Github repository release page.
If you are using Drupal and you would like to use Membership Extras with Webform CiviCRM, you can simply download and install the companion Drupal module and there you have it!
You can get the bleeding edge version of the extension by downloading the repository and checking out the develop branch.
Also the repository of our webform companion Drupal module is here.
Membership Extras is a plug and play extension. Most of the generic functionality works out of the box.
There are a few exceptions where we chose to not presumptively configure for you during the extension installation mainly due to those configurations vary largely from organisation to organisation.
If you would like to allow those offline memberships which opted into auto-renew to be renewed by the system automatically, you will need to enable the “Renew offline auto-renewal memberships” scheduled job.
With admin permissions, go to Administer -> System Settings -> Scheduled Jobs. Simply enabled the “Renew offline auto-renewal memberships” scheduled job. You also have a chance to configure the job to have a custom frequency.
You can also tell the system, to renew memberships a number of days in advance of membership end dates if you want to have the payment schedule for the next period ready in advance.
This can be configured by going to Administer -> Payment Plan Settings and specify the number of days you want the renewal to happen in advance in the “Days to renew in advance” setting.
A slightly more advanced setting for auto-renew handling is “Use latest price when auto renew membership?”. You can also find it in Administer -> Payment Plan Settings. By enabling this setting, the system will reflect the latest membership price for all memberships in the renewed contributions unless a membership is opted out.
The system can help you deal with memberships that have missed payments. You can configure such a status rule in Administer -> CiviMember -> Membership Status Rules.
Two new membership status triggers are provided by the extension in order to handle the status of memberships depending on the fulfilment of their instalments:
- Membership is in arrears (Payment Plan) - any instalment contribution is not completed and the contribution received date is in the past
- Membership is no longer in arrears (Payment Plan) - all instalment contributions whose contribution received date are in the past are completed
In a typical example where a membership should be set to inactive after a payment is late for 30 days, the new status rule should have the following configurations:
- Label: In Arrears
- Start Event: Membership is in arrears (Payment Plan)
- Start Event Adjustment: 30 days
- End Event: Membership is no longer in arrears (Payment Plan)
- Current Membership?: No
Please note that once you saved the new status rule, it will need to be moved to the top of the list in order to take effect (because payment check should have priority over date check).
If you happen to have another offline payment processor (payment processor that uses Payment_Manual class) and you would like all payment plan created in the back office to use that payment processor instead, you will be able to make that change in the “Offline payment processor for back office” setting by going to Administer -> Payment Plan Settings.
This is particularly useful if you are going to use our Manual Direct Debit extension.
When new contributions are being generated by the auto-renewal scheduled job, the custom fields information from the previous contributions will also be copied over by default. This is to allow any additional information that forms a part of your organisation’s payment process being preserved during automated process.
A good example is, if one contribution has a link to a Direct Debit Mandate, the newly generated contributions under the same recurring contribution will likely need the same link. This is all taken care of by default.
However, if there are custom information on the contributions that should not be carried over to any new generated contributions. You are able to exclude them by going to Administer -> Payment Plan Settings and selecting them in “Custom groups to be excluded when auto-renew” setting.
CiviCRM extension directory page: https://civicrm.org/extensions/membership-extras
Please contact the follow email if you have any question: [email protected]
Paid support for this extension is available, please contact us either via Github or at [email protected]