Agreed! Installment plans could save our membership from dwindling. Paypal is already setup to do this, so if we could at least track this through Wild Apricot, that would be amazing!

@skipat - sounds like a good idea. Could you post a new wishlist thread specifically about numeric fields? I have a feeling that others might find it useful for other reasons - which means we can prioritize it higher/sooner.

As this is a complicated system enhancement, a suggestion for us in the interim would be to enable us to designate fields in the Registration form as a numerical field, rather than the current text field. We still post installment payments manually to the attendee record for tracking. When we export to excel, the $ data fields have to be converted to numerical fields in order for Excel calculations to work. Having the ability to designate fields as numeric would be helpful, and possibly a quicker interim fix.

Thanks for the ideas.

This definitely sounds like a useful enhancement, though of course not a simple one as it should include things like:

- ability for people to go back to specific transactions and enter payments

- convert current pending/paid tracking to pending/partially paid/fully paid

- workflow rules

So I would appreciate additional ideas and insights from any other readers.

We also would like to see an installment payment option in WA.

This gets my vote too. Just a simple deposit and final payment would suffice for our needs.

We would also like the ability to support multiple payments for events. Our longer trips are paid in 2 or three installments. I'd also like the ability to designate if these payments can be made on line or only manually.

We are also getting asked more and more often to create payment plans for our members... We'd love to see an option to create a payment plan integrated into WA.

Right now we are simply dividing up payments for a membership at $X yearly rate to be paid out over X number of months... I'd love to see this option in WA roll out at the same time as being able to create invoices for other than new members... then the payment plan option could include the ability to send out invoices automatically each month the account has a payment due.

I also want the ability to manage installment payments. We have overnight and fly trips that we currently have members pay for in installments. Fly trips have 3 payments over a 3-5 month period, depending on the date of the trip. We'd like to manage that in WA, and would like the ability to set the payments to manual or on line as needed for each event, and possibly per installment. Ideally, members who have already registered for the event (and paid the initial deposit with their enrollment), would get automatic system reminders for the next payment due. The event manager would be able to post the payments to the member record in order to have WA do all the tracking of the payments, member gets receipt.

This has been discussed in several threads already... But,

We are using this app for our sports club. With that, we have annual league fees that can fairly large if paid all at once. So we would love to be able to set up several levels of installment payments, IE: monthly, quarterly, ect.

I would like to suggest it be expanded to allow non-member and/or members, that have registered for an event, the ability to log back in and make a payment, as needed.

Idealy, it would even have a running account balance and payment history.

Users may have chosen a manual Payment originally, but later have chosen to pay by credit card.

Also when an online registration payment does not go through, it would allow them to login and resubmit the payment.

For our more expensive events we ask for a deposit with final payment due prior to the event.

We would like this to work as follows:

Create event with value of say £200

When signing up for the event people pay £25

8 weeks before event payment of £175 due for those already signed up

8 weeks before event new people signing up until event full payment of £200 is due.

5 weeks before event those who have paid deposit must pay £175 or lose their deposit and will be unregistered from the event.

4 weeks before event due if £175

Hi Katie -- I think you are now talking about the cost to us of a Wild Apricot website each month?

This thread is about people who become members of WA users websites. Users (us) can choose which currency they pay in and how much.

Hi,

Please also consider that, like me, paying from Australia actually cost more than is advertised on your website because of the USD and Australian Dollar exchange rates..

Katie

Australia

For me, this sounds very reasonable and necessary. So all I am saying is that I want other clients to weigh in and help us to analyze this further and prioritize against other items in our queue.

Hi - you know what your members want and need possibly more than anyone. But can I throw open the debate from a marketing point of view?

The WA payment levels are great, and I expect most people find they work well.

But with a subscription (or 'membership') there is no necessary link between the subscription fee and the payment schedule or the term (length) of the subscription.The concept of 'annual' is forgotten, just a convenient way of communicating the deal.

In other words, a new subscriber can subscribe for access to a website for any length of time. For instance, he may want to subscribe for the summer (boats and surfing). Or while taking exams (University crib sheets). Or when he is not traveling (off on holiday for a month). Or she will subscribe to the 'My Wedding' site for the six months leading up to the event. Or to the mother and baby site in the early part of pregnancy. Or to the 'What Car' site for two or three months while looking and choosing his next car.

So he will subscribe for three or six months, not twelve.If he or she is not offered alternative shorter terms subscriptions, he or she will not subscribe because half or more of the money will be wasted.

However, I understand this could be a minority view. There is no point offering a facility like various terms unless is increases the number of new memberships that come aboard. Perhaps there should be a 'Marketing' forum?! It's really about increasing revenue.

The choices would not overload the payment level page of a site because, for example, the owner would choose out of a maximum number of choices. The most successful marketers I work with choose either a free trial period or a low-cost introduction then six month terms. If the member cancells, his subscription simply stops when that six month period ends.Their payments page contains just that option because that works the best of all.

Thank you Peter.

I have changed the post title - I think this will make it easier for other clients to find and vote on.

Conceptually this makes total sense to me.

Technically this is a bit of a challenge since we basically need to separate membership fee from the the actual payment schedule and make alternative payment schedules available within the same membership level.

We have been thinking about this ourselves and your post is very timely. I hope we will get more feedback and votes on this so that we can prioritize it higher.

However, since it is a substantial change, I do not expect us to start actual development for at least 6 months - and (I hope) the recession will be mostly over by then...

I work with an organization that holds an annual conference with a cost of ~$400.

To make it more affordable to some of the members, they have an option to do multi-pays/recurring payments.

The organization currently has a problem of multiple databases (one for purchases, one for membership, one for forums, one for email blasts, one for the conference), and was really looking forward to consolidating under Wild Apricot.

To my surprise, recurring payments only apply to membership.

Is there another option that I have missed? We use Authorize.net, and do have CIM.